NINE FAMOUS BIRMINGHAM MEN 



Nine Famous 
Birmingham Men 

Lectures Delivered in the 
University 



\^>/ r.-l Edited by 

J.'H. M airhead, LL.D 

Professor of Philosophy in the 
University of Birmingham 



" Not walls but men make a City." 
— Thucydides. 



Second Edition 
Birmingham 

Cornish Brothers, Ltd 

Publishers to the University 

37, New Street 

1909 






/ iU/'v 



/v/' 



PREFACE 

It hardly needs to be said that these are only 
a few of the men who have been the spiritual 
builders of the city of Birmingham as we know 
it, or who have otherwise lent it lustre. Besides 
those selected for the present course, the names 
of Boulton, Sturge, Cox, Vince, Bunce, Short- 
house, Lightfoot, Benson (to confine ourselves 
to the past) readily occur. Of the nine, only a 
few are Birmingham men in the sense of having 
been born in the town. But there is no reason 
why a city should not take as much credit for 
attracting as for giving birth to distinguished 
men. Birmingham has had a happy gift for 
this method of attachment. 

The Course was arranged somewhat hastily 
by the Social Study Committee of the Univer- 
sity as a contribution to the programme of the 
Workers' Educational Association for the session 
1908-9. Its aim was, while doing honour to 
great names, to show how it takes all sorts of 

vii 



viii PREFACE 

men and movements to make a great modern 
city. College lectures may aim at education 
in more than one way. They may seek ta 
inform and organize thought on a particular 
subject, or they may aim at touching feeling 
and inspiring the will. While some of the 
lectures which follow may, it is hoped, prove 
contributions to the literature of the subjects 
of which they treat, all of them are a call to 
the younger generation of Birmingham citizens 
to remember to what manner of city they 
belong and to what manner of men they 
owe it. 

A fear was expressed by some that the Course 
might raise controversies foreign to education 
and thus introduce elements of discord into 
the movement it was intended to help. The 
Committee was confident that the fear was 
groundless. They believed that Birmingham 
men and women had sufficient magnanimity to 
come together to do honour to great names 
without respect to party or creed. They remem- 
bered Carlyle's saying of himself and John 
Sterling that " they were agreed in every- 
thing but opinion," and felt convinced that the 
general result would be the wholesome recogni- 



PREFACE 



IX 



tion of the insignificance of theoretic differences 
in view of practical agreement on the great 
ends and issues of Hfe. 

Thanks are due to the generosity of a well- 
known citizen of Birmingham, who desires to 
remain anonymous, for enabling the publishers 
to add the portraits which accompany the lec- 
tures, without adding to the cost of the volume. 
These portraits may be regarded as his gift to 
the working men and women of Birmingham. 

Birmingham, March, 1909. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

JOSEPH PRIESTLEY i 

By Sir Oliver Lodge, F.R.S., Principal of 
the University of Birmingham. 

GEORGE DIXON 51 

By George H. Kenrick, Lord Mayor of Bir- 
mingham. 

GEORGE DAWSON 75 

By a. W. W. Dale, LL.D. (Vice-Chancellor of 
Liverpool University). 

JAMES WATT 109 

By F. W. Burstall, M.A., M.Sc, Professor of 
Engineering in the University of Birming- 
ham. 

JOHN BRIGHT 131 

By C. a. Vince, M.A. 

BISHOP WESTCOTT 159 

By the Rev. Canon J. H. B. Masterman, 
Professor of History in the University of 
Birmingham. 

tARDINAL NEWMAN 183 
By J. H. Muirhead, LL.D., Professor of 
Philosophy in the University of Birming- 
\ ham. 

SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES . . .225 

By R. Catterson Smith, Headmaster of the 

Birmingham Municipal School of Art. 

R. W. DALE 253 

By the Rev. Charles Silvester Horne, M.A. 



I 



zi 



LIST OF PORTRAITS 

Facing Page 
Joseph Priestley ...... i 

By kind permission of the Librarian of the Dr. Williams 
Library. 

George Dixon ...... 

From a photograph by Whitlock. 

George Dawson ...... 

From a photograph lent by T. F. Walker, Esq. 

James Watt ...... 

From an old engraving. 

John Bright 

From a photograph by Elliott & Fry. 

Bishop Westcott ..... 

From a photograph by Elliott & Fry. 

John Henry Newman, M.A., Vicar of St. Mary's, 

Oxford i83\ 

John Henry Cardinal Newman .... 205 

By kind permission of the Congregation of the Oratory of St. 
Philip Neri. 

Sir Edward Bume-Jones ..... 225 

From a photograph by Frederick Hollyer, from the painting 
by G. F. Watts 

R. W. Dale 253 

From a photograph by Whitlock. 



5iv 

75v 

109 

133V 

i59x 



zu 



JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 

Born near Leeds, 1733. Died in Pennsylvania, 1804. 
Lived in Birmingham from 1780 to 1791. 

By Oliver Lodge 

One hundred and five years ago, Joseph 
Priestley died in America, whither he had been 
driven by persecution and popular clamour. 
But the greater part of his life was spent, and 
his work was done, in England ; America was 
merely a refuge for one whose ideas were too 
advanced for his native country, which would 
not allow him reasonable freedom of speech ; 
the popular notions of freedom in England, at 
that particular time, being of the most rudi- 
mentary character. 

His life has a double aspect. On one side 
he was an experimental chemist : on the other 
a religious teacher and civil reformer. He 
never seems to have taken any share in party 
politics, technically so-called, but he was always 
on the side of civil and religious freedom ; and 
his earnest religious spirit forbade him to keep 
silent at a period when men's prejudices were 

L.F.M. 1 B 



2 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 

violently agitated by the occurrences of the 
French Revolution, and when a bigoted atti- 
tude in both Church and State was far more 
prevalent than it is now. He never made himself 
the least obnoxious to the law, but he did lay 
himself open to the lawlessness of his country- 
men. And unfortunately the ignorant mob 
of those days was at the beck and call of the 
party of superstition and bigotry, being only 
too ready to carry out its behests and to 
persecute any conspicuous person who was 
disapproved of by that protean party. To this 
persecution therefore it is impossible for any 
one treating of Priestley's life to shut his eyes. 
It would be absurd to treat him as if he were 
only a chemical philosopher ; for although his 
services to experimental chemistry were astonish- 
ing, his constant and dignified pleadings for civil 
and religious liberty were of even more value. 

On this head I will quote the testimony of a 
man of science, Dr. Thorpe, F.R.S., himself 
the author of a very useful small Life of Priestley 
in the " English Men of Science " series : 

Such is the irony of circumstance, that Priestley's name 
mainly lives as that of a chemical philosopher. When 
men have desired to do him honour, and have sought to 



EARLY LIFE 3 

perpetuate his memory by statues in public places, he is 
generally represented as making a chemical experiment. 
In reality, great as Priestley's merit is as an experimen- 
tarian philosopher, his greater claim on our regard and 
esteem rests upon his struggles and his sufferings in the 
cause of civil, political, and religious liberty. 

Priestley's father was a manufacturer of 
home-spun ; and he and his ancestors were sim- 
ple, honest, religious folk — hand-loom weavers 
for the most part — living in the country near 
Leeds, owning a small piece of land and a 
horse or cow : in fact they belonged to that 
solid homely conservative class which our 
townsman, the Right Honourable Jesse CoUings, 
is endeavouring to establish in greater num- 
bers among us. Joseph was born in York- 
shire, in 1733. At school he learnt Greek, 
and in the holidays made an effort at acquiring 
Hebrew ; while after leaving school, he taught 
himself the chief modern European languages. 
He was to be trained for the Ministry, and at 
the age of nineteen was sent for that purpose 
to Daventry — where was a small educational 
institution of importance in the history of 
English Nonconformity. Concerning it, and 
speaking as a Dissenter, Priestley expresses him- 
self as follows : 



4 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 

Shutting the doors of the Universities against us, and 
keeping the means of learning to yourselves, you may 
think to keep us in ignorance and so less capable to give 
you disturbance. But though ignominiously and unjustly 
excluded from the seats of learning, and driven to the 
expedient of providing at a great expense for scientific 
education among ourselves, we have had this advantage, 
that our institutions, being formed in a more enlightened 
age, are more liberal and therefore better calculated to 
answer the purpose of a truly liberal education. Thus 
while your Universities resemble pools of stagnant water 
secured by dams and mounds, ours are like rivers which, 
taking their natural course, fertilize a whole country. 

Fortunately this accusation cannot with truth 
be made now, against either the ancient or the 
modern Universities. 

Priestley's marked mental characteristics were 
a sturdy independence of thought, resolute 
regard for truth, and repudiation of dogmatic 
authority. These intellectual traits dominated 
his character, gave it strength, and ultimately 
brought upon him his misfortunes. 

His first ministry was at Needham Market 
in Suffolk, where he seems to have been 
wretchedly poor, partly because he would not 
receive contributions from those members of 
his congregation with whose opinions he did not 
agree. His income we are told was thirty 
pounds a year. His preaching also, though 



TRAINING 5 

weighty and vigorous, was hampered by a 
stammer, with which he had to struggle through 
the greater part of his Ufe. So after three years 
he migrated to Nantwich, where he conducted 
a school. Here he was better off, and acquired 
some philosophic instruments as well as books ; 
notably an air-pump and an electrical machine, 
which he taught his pupils to use and to keep 
in order, though at that time he had no leisure 
to make original observations. 

At the age of twenty-eight he was removed 
to Warrington, to become a teacher in the 
Warrington Academy for the education of 
young men of every religious denomination 
for the Christian ministry or as laymen. Here 
he became able to marry and to take up the 
more serious study of Natural Philosophy. 

But what particularly impressed him, as a 
practical educationist, was that, whilst most 
of his pupils were designed for situations in 
civil and active life, every article in the plan of 
their education was adapted to the learned 
professions ; and at a later date he proceeded 
to trace the cause of this anomaly : 

Formerly none but the clergy were thought to have 
any occasion for learning. It was natural, therefore, that 



6 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 

the whole plan of education, from the Grammar School 
to the finishing at the University, should be calculated for 
their use. 

Besides, in those days, the great ends of human society 
seem to have been but little understood. Men of the 
greatest rank, fortune, and influence, who took the lead 
in all the affairs of State, had no idea of the great objects 
of wise and extensive policy, and therefore could never 
apprehend that any fund of knowledge was requisite for 
the most eminent stations in the community. 

This state of things to a great extent still 
persists, among leaders of society and some 
of the governing classes, not excepting the 
average Member of Parliament ; but a more 
reasonable and comprehensive plan of education 
is fortunately being initiated, and ultimately, 
it is to be hoped, will permeate even more of 
the Government Offices than at present. 

It was from Warrington that Priestley paid 
his first visit to London. He seems to have 
spent a Christmas there at the end of the year 
1765, and to have encountered not only John 
Canton, an admirable experimental philoso- 
pher, but also that exceptionally great man, 
Benjamin Franklin, then about sixty years of 
age. Franklin and Priestley seem to have 
become close friends; and the result was a 
stimulated interest and keenness in Natural 
Philosophy on the part of Priestley. 



ELECTRICAL EXPERIMENTS 7 

On his return to Warrington he made some 
notable electrical discoveries concerning the 
discharge of a Ley den jar round a long circuit. 
Among other things he discovered — what I myself 
happened to rediscover in 1888, thinking they 
were new — the two series of experiments called 
respectively " the alternative path " and " the 
side flash." A conductor transmitting a current 
of great magnitude and suddenness is able to spit 
off a spark even to an insulated body in the 
neighbourhood ; which conductor however is 
not thereby charged, for it is instantaneously 
discharged again. The spark is, in fact, a 
double one, both in and out. Even an electro- 
scope is hardly affected at all by such a spark 
— proper precautions being taken to prevent 
any permanent or residual effect, due to im- 
perfect earth connexion. This ' side flash ' is 
a phenomenon of importance in connexion with 
lightning conductors. 

The discovery of the other experiment — 
that of " the alternative path " — led in his case, 
as in my own, to a large number of measure 
ments of the impedance of conductors, of various 
shapes and of many materials ; the alternative 
spark length across an air-gap being a measure 



8 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 

of the potential required to force the current 
round a closed circuit. The theory in his day 
was, of course, not understood, because the 
data were not available, as they were in 1888 ; 
the whole subject of "self-induction," which 
dominates the phenomenon, being completely 
unknown — unknown till Faraday made his 
experiments and Maxwell gave the essential 
mathematical features of their theory. 

These and other experiments of Priestley 
revived in this country the use of large electrical 
machines and batteries of Ley den jars — together 
with other experiments which had also been 
most energetically carried out by Franklin in 
the American colonies. 

It was probably in connexion with these 
observations that the University of Edinburgh 
conferred upon Priestley the Honorary Degree 
of LL.D., and he thus became Dr. Priestley. 

At the age of thirty-four he was invited to 
leave the school at Warrington, where he had 
been very successful, and take charge of the 
congregation of Mill Hill Chapel at Leeds ; his 
stammer having been, by pertinacious care 
and personal trouble, very greatly reduced in 
intensity. 



WORK AT LEEDS 9 

From Leeds he issued a number of pamphlets, 
vindicating the cause of civil and religious 
liberty, and standing up for Nonconformist prin- 
ciples against what he considered the prejudices 
of his countrymen. He was well aware that 
some of these pamphlets were obnoxious to people 
in authority, and that he ran the risk of some 
personal danger by their publication ; for he 
says in one of his letters : 

I am about to make a bolder push than ever for the 
pillory, the King's Bench Prison, or something worse. 

It is thought that he is here referring to a 
pamphlet that he wrote on Wilkes and Liberty 
in connexion with the struggle between the 
electors of Middlesex and the House of Commons 
of that day. 

The most important fact in connexion with 
Leeds, however, is that he there began his chemi- 
cal experiments on gases, — and published what 
he called Enquiries into the doctrine of air ; 
by which series of experiments he became one 
of the greatest chemical discoverers of his 
time. 

It must be understood that the name " gas " 
had not then come into use, and all kinds of 
gases were called " airs." Indeed the doctrine 



10 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 

of the four elements, "earth," "air," "fire" 
and " water," still persisted. Even now many 
minerals are spoken of as " earths," as if they 
were varieties of the one element. Some liquids 
are still popularly spoken of as " waters," like 
"aqua fortis " and "aqua regia " ; oils and 
spirits being also recognized — for instance " oil of 
vitriol," and " spirit of nitre " ; though there 
is neither water, oil, nor spirit in the compo- 
sition of any of them. Even to this day only 
one variety of "fire" is popularly recognized — 
that due to combustion, — but we know that the 
heat of the sun and of the electric spark and arc 
are independent of combustion. Indeed it is not 
very easy to specify what is meant by the " tem- 
perature " of an electric spark or of the discharge 
in a vacuum tube. 

Anyway, in Priestley's time the gases were 
called " airs " ; one of the best known being 
the " fixed air " or " choke damp " of the 
mines ; another kind being " fire damp " or 
" inflammable air." " Fixed air " was what 
we now call carbonic acid or carbon dioxide ; 
" inflammable air " was either hydrogen or 
marsh gas or any other undiscriminated hydro- 
carbon that burnt with a flame. The word 



SODA WATER ii 

" damp " is used in middle English for gases, 
and is still found in German for vapour. 

Priestley's first experiments on ' fixed ' air were 
made with the gas which was given off by 
fermenting wort, at a neighbouring brewery. 
He wrote a pamphlet on the impregnation of 
water with fixed air, which was translated into 
French and excited a good deal of interest. 
He advocated the use of a condensing engine 
for pumping the gas into water ; and, what is 
more surprising, succeeded in getting the Admir- 
alty to fit two warships with apparatus for the 
production of what we now call soda-water, in 
order, as he thought, to prevent the ravages of 
scurvy on board ship. 

He became a Fellow of the Royal Society 
about this time ; and the Council of the Society 
so much appreciated the invention of soda- 
water as to bestow on him, for this and his other 
experiments, the Copley Medal ; which is now, 
and presumably was then, their highest honour ! 

When Priestley left Leeds, at apparently the 
age of about forty-six, he entered the service 
of Lord Shelburne ; after the fashion of those 
days, when a nobleman was usually accepted 
as the patron of a man of letters or a man of 



12 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 

science, as the case might be, — faciUtating his 
researches and sharing some of their interest 
and fame. With Lord Shelburne he travelled 
about Europe and met many people of impor- 
tance. What struck him was the prevalent 
atmosphere of agnosticism, which was evidently 
very marked during the latter half of the 
eighteenth century. He reports that the com- 
pany which he met at Lord Shelburne' s for the 
most part hardly knew what Christianity was, 
and they considered it very remarkable that 
a man of whose understanding they had some 
opinion could profess to believe in it. 

Priestley was thus led to write his Letters to 
a Philosophical Unbeliever, hoping to be able 
to combat their prejudices with advantage : 
indeed he felt that the prestige of his philo- 
sophical pursuits was chiefly of value in enabling 
him to be listened to. when he defended the 
principles of Christianity and tried to free it 
from those corruptions which prevented its 
reception by thoughtful people. 

He also wrote on Natural and Revealed Reli- 
gion, and a Harmony of the Gospels. 

But the result of these publications was other 
than he had expected, and indeed other than 



MODERNISM 13 

any one at the present time could imagine to 
be likely. His efforts at conciliating un- 
believers and bringing them towards something 
like orthodoxy (like similar efforts in our own 
time, known under the title of Modernism) were 
the subject of bitter attack and outcry from the 
rigidly orthodox, and from their numerous though 
barely qualified disciples. He was attacked in 
almost every periodical, was regarded as an 
unbeliever in revelation, and was spoken of as 
little better than an atheist. 

This outbreak of mistaken bigotry had the 
effect of separating him from Lord Shelburne ; 
for though they parted amicably and with 
mutual esteem, and though Lord Shelburne 
paid him a liberal pension or annuity to the end 
of his life, the patron did not care to be any 
longer associated with a philosopher who was 
liable to be so rabidly abused. 

Priestley went to London, and there met 
with help from Parker, the optician, and from 
Josiah Wedgwood, the great potter, who kept 
him supplied with the appliances that he wanted 
in order to continue his chemical experiments* 
which otherwise, in his comparative poverty, 
he would have been obliged to suspend. He 



14 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 

also saw a good deal more of Franklin, and his 
testimony to the attitude of this great man in 
connexion with the rupture between England 
and the American Colonies is of value ; because 
it is often thought that Franklin wished to 
separate the two countries, whereas his real 
desire was to unite them into one great and 
glorious Empire. The following is Priestley's 
testimony to Franklin : 

The unity of the British Empire in all its parts was a 
favourite idea of his. He used to compare it to a beauti- 
ful china vase which, if ever broken, could never be put 
together again ; and so great an admirer was he of the 
British constitution that he said he saw no inconvenience 
from its being extended over a great part of the globe. 

I can bear witness that he was so far from promoting, 
as was generally supposed, that he took every method in 
his power to prevent, a rupture between the two countries. 

In fact, what Franklin was working for was 
the ideal towards which so many are nowadays 
quietly striving, namely the effective Federation 
of the English-speaking race. 

In 1780, at the age of about forty-seven, 
Priestley came to settle in Birmingham. Here, 
says Dr. Thorpe, he had friends prepared to 
welcome him, and a society in every way 
sympathetic and congenial. Moreover, he was 



LUNAR SOCIETY 15 

desirous of resuming his ministerial duties, which 
had been intermitted for the past six or seven 
years ; and an opportunity of doing so, with a 
congregation not less liberal than he had served 
at Leeds, offered itself, owing to the approaching 
retirement of Mr. Hawkes from the charge of 
the " New Meeting." As regards his philosophi- 
cal pursuits, he had the convenience of good 
workmen of every kind, and he could count 
upon the practical sympathy and interest of 
men like Watt and his partner Boulton, Keir, 
Withering, Wedgwood, Erasmus Darwin, and 
the Galtons — all at that time living in Birming- 
ham or in its vicinity. These men and their 
friends constituted a cultured society without 
a parallel in any other town in the kingdom, 
except possibly the Metropolis. 

He became a member of a society founded by 
Matthew Boulton and Erasmus Darwin, called 
" the Lunar Society," which consisted of ten 
or a dozen members, who met at each other's 
houses once a month, regulating their meetings 
by the full moon, so that they might be able to 
see their way home, since the illumination 
of the streets and roads in those days was 
exceedingly defective. They occasionally had 



i6 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 

friends to visit them, and among others we find 
not only Wedgwood, but also Sir William 
Herschel, the astronomer, and Smeaton, the 
designer of the Eddystone Lighthouse. 

In this society, says Priestley, we had nothing 
to do with the religious or political principles 
of each other ; we were united by a common 
love of science, which we thought sufficient to 
bring together persons of all distinctions — 
Christians and Jews, Mahometans and heathens, 
Monarchists and Republicans. 

No wonder they were interested in science, 
for it was an epoch of great activity — the era of 
Black and Cavendish, of Laplace and Herschel. 

One of the chief subjects for discussion was 
Priestley's new experiments in pneumatic chem- 
istry, and many were the controversies between 
him and James Watt as to the composition of 
water ; for, difficult as it is to realize, even the 
composition of water was in those days unknown 
Chemistry, truly, was in its infancy. 

Not only with Watt did he have controversies, 
but also with the French chemists, under the 
leadership of Lavoisier, to whom he had shown 
some of his experiments while on a visit to 
Paris. The experiments were Priestley's, but 



PHLOGISTON 17 

the insight into their meaning was Lavoisier's. 
Priestley, in his theoretical views, ran aground 
on an unprofitable and unproductive doctrine 
of " phlogiston " — an imaginary entity whereby 
he thought that metals differed from their ores 
or rusts. It is difficult to explain what phlogis- 
ton is now, because it does not exist ; and it is 
needless therefore to try to reconstruct the ideas 
of those times. The ideas are only of interest 
as showing with what difficulty even the elemen- 
tary facts of chemistry were understood and 
assimilated. Priestley thought that an ore 
was turned into a metal by pumping into it 
phlogiston or the property of inflammability ; 
md that when any metal, say iron, lost its 
phlogiston it crumbled into powder or turned 
into rust. 

Lavoisier weighed the rust, and found that 
it weighed more than the original metal, thus 
showing that it had gained something ; and his 
doctrine was that the metal had combined 
with some other material (which later on he 
called oxygen) so as to form an oxide. In fact, 
ae gave the true explanation. But Priestley 
md the believers in phlogiston were not per- 
lurbed by the experiment and demonstration of 

L.F.M. C 



i8 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 

the increase in weight when a metal is oxidized. 
They admitted the increase, but claimed that 
phlogiston was the principle of levity, that it 
was therefore opposed to gravitation, that it 
tended upwards as flame did, and therefore 
that the more a thing lost of it the heavier it 
naturally got. 

The controversy, you see, lay between the 
gain of a positive substance and the loss of a 
negative or hostile principle ; and it is not always 
easy to decide between alternatives such as these. 

The same kind of controversy seems likely j 
to occur in connexion with the effect of vegeta- 
tion on the soil — an effect which renders the 
rotation of crops a necessity. Continual growth 
of one variety of crop exhausts the soil: but 
why does it exhaust it ? Is it because it has ■ 
taken something out, essential to the growth 
of future crops of the same kind ; or is it that i 
it has secreted a poison or something hostile 
to the growth of the same kind of crop ? This 
latter has been suspected ; and it is a moot 
point which of these two opposing views is true. 

Accordingly we are in this matter in the 
position of the controversialists of the Priestley- 
Lavoisier period : we do not know what the 



PHLOGISTON 19 

deleterious influence is due to — whether it is 
'due to the introduction of a poison, or to the 
removal of a healthy and sustaining element ; 
ior whether there is truth in both assertions. It 
:is a matter for experiment and investigation ; 
'and doubtless in another ten years or so an 
answer may be given. I only quote it as an 
instance of a similar kind of difficulty, in order 
Eto show that the error which Priestley made 
was not an unnatural one, and that all the 
difficulties of the men of old time may be gener- 
ally paralleled by something which in our 
present state of knowledge seems equally difficult 
and uncertain. 

[ The following is an extract from a letter of 
IBoulton to Wedgwood, dated March 30, 1781 : 

We have long talked of phlogiston without knowing 
What we talked about : but now that Dr. Priestley hath 
prought the matter to light, we can pour that element out 
pf one vessel into another ; can tell how much of it by 
iccurate measurement is necessary to reduce a calx to a 
-netal, which is easily done, and without putting that calx 
}nto contact with any visible thing. In short, this goddess 
)f levity can be measured and weighed like other matter, 
"or the rest, I refer you to the doctor himself. 

. And Priestley himself speaks as follows : 
S My experiments are certainly inconsistent with Mr. 



20 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 

Lavoisier's supposition of there being no such thing as 
phlogiston, and that it is the addition of air, and not the 
loss of anything, that converts a metal into a calx. 

That mercury in its metallic state does contain phlogis- 
ton or inflammable air is evident from the production of 
nitrous air by the solution of it in spirits of nitre, and I 
make nitrous air from nothing but nitrous vapour and 
inflammable air ; so that it indisputably consists of these 
two ingredients. 

The " calx," or oxide, on which Priestley 
made his most famous experiment, was the red 
oxide of mercury, obtained by heating metallic 
mercury in contact with air. Some of this red 
powder, which in his view had lost its phlogiston, 
he put into a test-tube with some mercury, 
and inverted it in a small bath of quicksilver, 
so that its open mouth was submerged and the 
red powder collected at the upper closed end 
of the tube. Upon this powder he then con- 
centrated the rays of the sun with a burning 
glass, with the intention of putting back the! 
phlogiston and re-converting it into metallic 
mercury. The red powder slowly became metal- 
lic mercury, under the influence of the solar 
heat, and at the same time the quicksilver was 
forced down the tube by the exhalation of 
a kind of air, which in reality was oxygen — 
viz. the oxygen which the red powder had 



il 



OXYGEN 21 

^possessed in combination, but which was now 
expelled. This is the experiment represented 
by the statue in Victoria Square, Birming- 
ham. With the "air" so given off from the 
calx or oxide of mercury — what he called 
1 "dephlogisticated air," and what we call oxygen — 
he made many famous experiments — such as are 
'to this day repeated in elementary courses of 
chemistry, and are familiar to aU, even junior, 
students of the subject. 

Priestley called it dephlogisticated air be- 
cause he thought that phlogiston had been 
removed from it and transferred to the metallic 
mercury. Lavoisier called it " oxygen " (acid- 
'producer — the Germans similarly call it Sauer- 
'Stoff — the essence, of sourness) under the idea 
that it was responsible for the generation of 
jacid properties when it entered into compounds. 
'That idea about its acid-generating property, 
'though it survived for more than half a century, 
■later on was abandoned and, when I learnt 
^chemistry, was practically extinct. 
• Curiously enough, there are signs, within the 
'last year or two, of a revival of this idea ; at 
iny rate there are one or two chemists who see 
^reason for supposing that oxygen is really, after 



22 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 

all, the acid-generating principle, and not hydro- 
gen, as had been thought in the interim. I do 
not for a moment say that this view is right, 
or express any opinion upon it : it is not a 
matter to be discussed except by experts ; I 
only instance it as a curious example of the way 
in which scientific theory winds itself round in 
spirals, so that to the scoffer and man of ignor- 
ance it may appear as if there were no progress, 
whereas really there is very essential progress 
all the time, and each turn of the spiral is a 
great deal higher than the one which preceded 
it. 

What we ought to learn from the facts I 
have narrated is never to be contemptuous of old 
and extinct views, but always to keep our minds 
open to recognize the germ of truth that may 
underlie them. It is that germ of truth which 
gave them their vitality ; and when they have 
had time to shake off the admixture of error 
which confused and enshrouded them, they 
may emerge at length the better and brighter 
for the experience — all the clearer for the rest 
and peace pertaining to obscurity. 

At this stage I think I had better give a list 
of the gases which Priestley discovered; and 

I 



OXYGEN 23 

some of the experiments by which he manu- 
factured them I will repeat before you. 

But first I will quote his remarkably accurate 
anticipation of the uses of the new gas, oxygen 
or dephlogisticated air. The following is an 
extract from his writings : 

Nothing would be easier than to augment the force 
of fire to a prodigious degree by blowing it with dephlogis- 
ticated air instead of common air. Possibly piatina might 
be melted by means of it. 

From the greater strength and vivacity of the flame 
of a candle, in this pure air, it may be conjectured that it 
might be peculiarly salutary to the lungs in certain morbid 
cases. . . . But perhaps we may also infer from these experi- 
ments that though pure dephlogisticated air might be very 
useful as a medicine, it might not be so proper for us in the 
usual healthy state of the body : for, as a candle bums 
out much faster in dephlogisticated than in common air, 
so we might, as may be said, live out too fast, and the animal 
powers be too soon exhausted in this pure kind of air. A 
moralist, at least, may say that the air which Nature has 
provided for us is as good as we deserve. . , . Who can tell 
but that, in time, this pure air may become a fashionable 
article in luxury. Hitherto only two mice and myself 
have had the privilege of breathing it. 

That is excellent, and typical of his genius 
and shrewdness ; but unfortunately his very 
ingenuity helped him to retain wrong ideas. 
In theory he had no instinct for guessing right, 
such as the great men of science have had — an 



24 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 

intuitive feeling for the right end of any 
stick : he may almost be said to have had a 
predilection for the wrong end ; and that fact 
alone puts him out of the first flight of scientific 
men. He was a skilful and painstaking experi- 
mentalist, and possessed scientific ability of a 
high kind, but never does he approach the level 
of Faraday or of James Watt. These men, 
and especially Faraday, had an instinct for 
being right ; while as to Sir Isaac Newton — the 
accuracy not only of his theories but even of his 
guesses strikes us now as almost superhuman. 
Of Priestley's oxygen memoir Dr. Thorpe 
speaks as follows : j 

This paper is in certain respects one of the most note! 
worthy of Priestley's productions. The experiments are 
original, ingenious, and striking, but as an example of hi^ 
inductive capacity, or as an indication of its author's 
logical power, or of his ability to try judicially the very 
issue he has raised, it is significant only of the profound 
truth of his own words that " we may take a maxim so| 
strongly for granted that the plainest evidence of sens© 
will not entirely change, and often hardly modify, our 
persuasions ; and the more ingenious a man is, the more 
effectually he is entangled in his errors ; his ingenuity 
only helping him to deceive himself by evading the ion 
of truth." 

Indeed Priestley often speaks of Lavoisier' 
arguments as so plausible and ingenious tha 



THEORY 25 

he feels nearly upset by them ; but he calls his 
own ingenuity to his aid, and once more success- 
fully resists, or, as he himself says, '* evades " 
the force of truth — not of course recognizing 
it for a moment as such. In fact, his attitude 
is a standing caution to scholars against wrong- 
headed scientific dogmatism. His experiments 
were* admirable, but his perception of their 
theoretical relations was entirely inadequate 
and, as we now think, quite erroneous. It 
needed a good deal of ability to adhere so 
forcibly to the wrong and therefore the cumbrous 
view. 

Of all the gases which Priestley manufactured, 
some he is held to have discovered ; others, 
although he made them and examined their 
properties, are not identified with his name, 
because he did not sufficiently discriminate 
them from others. For instance, he made 
carbonic oxide, and said it burned with a blue 
flame ; but he called it inflammable air, and did 
not seem to know that it was really different 
from hydrogen and marsh gas. So also with 
phosphuretted hydrogen and chlorine : he pre- 
pared them, but did not follow the matter up. 
The gases which he is really held to have dis- 



26 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 

covered are the following, — and a remarkable 
list it is : — 

1. Nitrogen, which he called phlogisticated 
air, and which he obtained by burning hydro- 
carbons in a closed vessel and then absorbing 
the carbonic acid produced, leaving a gas which 
would no longer support combustion, but which 
was not soluble in water, and did not precipitate 
lime — as fixed air did. The simplest substance 
to burn, for the purpose of thus isolating atmo- 
spheric nitrogen, is phosphorus. 

2. Nitric oxide (NO), which he called nitrous 
air, and made from copper and nitric acid in 
the usual way. 

He also showed that on bubbling oxygen up 
into this gas, collected over water, fumes were 
formed, which rapidly dissolved, leaving the 
gas less than before ; and he remarks on the 
astonishing phenomenon of one gas thus swal- 
lowing up another and destro5dng it. He even 
used this method for incipient quantitative 
analysis, showing that it enabled the amount 
of oxygen present to be estimated, thus begin- 
ning the subject of Eudiometry. 

3. Nitrous oxide (N2O) which he called de- 
phlogisticated nitrous air. 



DISCOVERY OF GASES 27 

4. Hydrochloric acid (HCl), which he called 
marine acid air. 

5. Ammonia (NH3) which he called alkaline 
air, and showed that these last two, when put 
together, destroyed each other and formed a 
solid cloud. 

6. Sulphurous acid (SO2), which he called 
vitriolic air. 

7. Oxygen, which he called dephlogisticated 
air. 

8. Silicon Fluoride (Si FJ, which he called 
Fluor-acid air, and showed its singular pro- 
perty of coating itself over with stone or flint 
when bubbles of it were sent up into water. 

9. Sulphuretted hydrogen, which he called 
sulphuretted inflammable air. 

He likewise made experiments on the effect 
of different gases on sound, by ringing a bell 
in an air-pump receiver, filled with the gases. 
f But one of his most weighty and important 
observations consisted in discovering the effect 
of vegetation upon air ; which he published in a 
paper under the title On Air in which a candle 
has been burned. For in this air he had put a 
sprig of mint, and he found that after a few 
days of sunshine the air which had extinguished 



28 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 

a candle could once more support combustion 
and also life. He had to prove that this was 
not a peculiar property of mint : so he next 
tried balsam, and found that it acted in the 
same way. But it might be argued that these 
were stimulating and spicy kinds of plants, 
which might be expected to recuperate an 
exhausted substance. He therefore tried com- 
mon weeds like groundsel, which also acted in 
the same way ; and vegetables like spinach, 
which he found specially competent. He also 
took water plants and exposed them to sunshine 
under water, so as to see the cloud of little 
bubbles rising under the action of the solar rays. 
These bubbles he collected and proved to be 
dephlogisticated air, or oxygen. He thus arrived 
at the important conclusion that the air which 
was spoilt by animal life was renewed by plant 
life — that the two acted in opposite directions, 
and so kept the atmosphere of constant quality 
— a matter clearly of the first importance. 

One short paragraph I will quote from his 
writings, indicating what now seems to us an 
amusing sort of ignorance at the time ; namely 
a paragraph relating to indiarubber : 
I^^Since this work was printed off I have seen a substance 



II 



POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 29 

excellently adapted to the purpose of wiping off from 
paper the marks of black lead pencil. It must therefore 
be of singular use to those who practise drawing. It is 
sold by Mr. Nairne, mathematical instrument maker, 
opposite the Royal Exchange. He sells a cubical piece 
of about half an inch for three shillings, and he says it will 
last several years. 



It is necessary now to give some indications 
of the position of Priestley as a Political Philo- 
sopher, and to exhibit his importance in the 
history of Sociology. But as this falls within 
Professor Muirhead's province, and he may be 
able to do it, I hope, without undue trouble, I 
have asked him to insert here a few paragraphs, 
either from one of his Courses of Lectures, or 
from some other store, illustrative of Priestley 
the citizen and his Political ideals. 

For a full account of the ideas which Priestley 
expounded in his Essay on the First Principles 
of Government, and his other political writings it 
would be necessary to go at some length into the 
political conditions and opinions of the time. It 
must be sufficient here to recall that the chief 
need of the eighteenth century in the latter 
half of which he wrote was the assertion of in- 
dividual rights against misguided interference 



30 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 

of the government ; while that of the nineteenth 
century (the ideas of which Priestley partly 
anticipated), was the assertion of the common 
good against institutions which were based either 
on mere right of prescription or on the interest 
and influence of a section of the community. 
Hence it was that the watchword of the one was 
the "natural rights of the individual/' that of 
the other was the " good of the whole." Priest- 
ley represents the transition between these two 
movements. Sir Oliver Lodge has shown that 
he had little instinct for true theory in chemis- 
try, and even showed a lamentable faculty of 
getting hold of the stick by the wrong end. 
There is a similar want of clarity in his political 
theory. He may be said to have got hold of 
the stick by both ends and not to have known 
which was the right one. Yet two points stand 
clearly out in connexion with each of the above 
affinities, establishing his claim to honour in 
political and moral philosophy as well as in 
chemistry. 

I. He asserted the claim of the right of private 
judgment and the principle of toleration with 
a completeness and consistency that excelled 
even John Locke and his own distinguished 



POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 31 

contemporary and brother-at-arms in the same 
cause, Dr. Price. " The whole system of 
uniformity seems to me to be founded on very 
narrow and shortsighted views of poHcy"; 
" unbounded freedom in thinking upon all kinds 
of subjects may certainly be attended by some 
inconvenience, but it cannot be restrained with- 
out infinitely greater inconvenience"; "let us 
be free ourselves and leave the blessings of 
freedom to our posterity" ; "I stand in need 
of liberty myself, and I wish that every creature 
of God may enjoy it equally with myself," are 
some of his most characteristic sayings. 

2. To him belonged the merit of striking the 
note which Bentham took up and extended with 
such power and variation in his Utilitarian 
philosophy. Writing of the growth of his own 
opinions Bentham tells us that it was by a 
pamphlet of Priestley's that " light was added 
to warmth. In the phrase ' the greatest happi- 
ness of the greatest number,' I there saw 
delineated for the first time a plain as well as 
a true standard of whatever is right and wrong, 
useful and useless or mischievous in human 
conduct, whether in the field of morals or 
politics." ^ In a more picturesque reference 
* Works, vol. X. 69. 



32 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 

Bentham tells us he came on Priestley's pam- 
phlet in a London coffee-house and rose from 
the table crying '* Eureka ! " 

While clearly indicating the Utilitarian prin- 
ciple, Priestley brought with him, what was 
uncommon in those times, the caution of a 
scientific observer into the field of politics. 
Any governmental interference, he held in true 
Utilitarian spirit, may be justified if it be for 
the good of the Community, yet legislation is 
a high and difficult art, " We are so little capable 
of arguing d priori in matters of government 
that it may seem experiments only can deter- 
mine how far this power of the legislature 
ought to extend." This speculative caution is 
perhaps the reason why he failed (as Bentham 
elsewhere accuses him of doing) to make any 
adequate application of the principle he had 
the honour of formulating. Be this as it may» 
there is a pleasure in tracing the hospitable 
tolerance of all forms of religious opinion, and 
the sane collectivism in politics that have 
always been characteristic of Birmingham to 
the teaching of one of the earliest of its famous 
men. (J. H. M.) 



WORK IN BIRMINGHAM 33 

We must now turn to the remainder of his 
life. His time in Birmingham was not wholly 
devoted to science : much of it was given to 
theology, to preaching, and to public work. 
Of his preaching, the following is written by a 
member of his congregation : 

I look upon his character as a preacher to be as amiable 
as his character as a philosopher is great. In the pulpit 
he is mild, persuasive, and unaffected, and his sermons are 
full of sound reasoning and good sense. He is not what 
is called an orator; he uses no actions, no declamation ; 
but his voice and manner are those of one friend speaking 
to another. 

His Birmingham congregation is described as 

the most liberal in England. And a member 

of it describes him thus : 

A man of admirable simplicity, gentleness, and kind- 
ness of heart, united with great acuteness of intellect. 
j I can never forget the impression produced on me by the 
serene expression of his countenance. 

In the domestic relations of life he was uniformly kind 
and affectionate. Not malice itself could ever fix a stain 
■on his private conduct or impeach his integrity. 

' While in Birmingham he wrote a book The 
History of the Corruptions of Christianity, in 

'which he attacked many of what we now see to 
be the errors and superstitions which grew 
round the simplicity of the early Gospel. He 
could hardly expect this book to pass unopposed ; 

L.F.M. D 



34 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 

in fact it was received with a storm of dis- 
approval, and at Dordrecht on the Continent 
it was burnt by the common hangman. The 
contentions contained in it were, however, what 
we should now consider to be of a reasonable 
and sensible character, and have been summar- 
ized thus : 

The New Testament, in Priestley's view, is not to be 
construed as a book of enigmas which might belong to any 
age. It is not dropped straight out of heaven into the 
hands of the man of to-day for him to make what he will 
of it. It belongs to a specific period ; it was written for a 
given class of persons ; it was written to be understood. 

Accordingly, it is the whole object of Priestley's his- 
tories of doctrine to get at the mind of the common Christian 
people in the first age ; to make their primary under- 
standing of Scripture the norm for its true interpretation. 

The plan was novel, the conception original, the whole 
endeavour strictly scientific in its method and basis. 

Another ground of offence appears to have 
been the enthusiasm with which he supported i 
the Sunday-school movement. We are told 
that this movement began in Birmingham ini 
1784, and was favoured by most denomina- 
tions. It was opposed, however, by certain ^ 
people who insisted that all children should 
attend the worship of the Established Church. 

It must be admitted that the times were 



LIBRARIES 35 

desperately narrow, and I regret to have to 
refer to them. I am making no appeal to 
prejudice or sectarian animosity : it is merely 
a question of history. We can congratulate 
ourselves, I hope, in recognizing how different 
the atmosphere is now, and how out of date 
such controversies are. 

Another service which Priestley achieved, of 
benefit to any community with whom he resided, 
was the establishment of a library. I believe 
that the Old Library in Birmingham, as well 
as the one in Leeds, owes its initiation to him. 
But I regret to say that even popular access to 
books was at that time strongly objected to : 
it was said to tend to the spread of Rationalism, 
and the library with its contents was vigorously 
abused by the orthodox. 

Nevertheless Priestley considered that his 
time in Birmingham was the happiest period 
of his life, and in an autobiographical sketch 
he speaks of it as follows : 

I esteem it a singular happiness to have lived in an 
'age and country in which I have been at full liberty both 
jto investigate, and by preaching and writing to propagate, 
"eligious truth ; for though the freedom I have used for 
this purpose was for some time disadvantageous to me, it 
'A^as not long so ; and my present situation is such that 



36 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 

I can, with the greatest openness, urge whatever appears 
to me the truth of the Gospel, not only without giving the 
least offence, but with the entire approbation of those 
with whom I am particularly connected. 

But alas, this peaceful period was not to 
continue. Indeed, almost as he was writing, 
preparations must have been made for that 
mad outburst of popular passion which eventu- 
ally drove him to America. It seems to have 
begun on the first anniversary of the taking of the 
Bastille in Paris. The fourteenth of July, 1791, 
was celebrated in several towns, among others 
in Birmingham. What party it was that stimu- 
lated the rising of the mob I prefer not to inquire, 
but certainly those who instigated and directed 
the outrage soon lost all control over the forces 
which they invoked ; and the result was a riot 
or series of riots of the most disgraceful as well 
as of the most alarming character. 

The controversial methods of those times 
seem to have been miserably unfair, no attempt 
being made to understand the position of an 
opponent ; phrases divorced from their con- 
text, and employed only in a symbolical sense, 
were quoted as if they had been intended 
literally. A notable instance of this is a quota-' 



BIGOTRY 37 

tion from one of Priestley's Familiar Letters 
Addressed to the Inhabitants of Birmingham, 
where Priestley compares the process of free 
inquiry to the action of gunpowder, in a passage 
which concludes thus : 

The present silent propagation of truth may even be 
compared to those causes in Nature which lie dormant 
for a time, but which in proper circumstances act with the 
greatest violence. We are, as it were, laying gunpowder, 
grain by grain, under the old building of error and super- 
stition, which a single spark may hereafter inflame, so as 
to produce an instantaneous explosion ; in consequence 
of which that edifice, the erection of which has been the 
work of ages, may be overturned, in a moment, and so 
effectually as that the same foundation can never be buOt 
upon again. 

This paragraph became to the enemies of 
the Dissenters a common topic of allusion, and 
was read in the House of Commons as an un- 
questionable proof of the dangerous designs 
of that body with respect to the constitution 
of this country. Hence the mischievous thinkers 
found no difficulty in persuading the unthinking 
actors that the real intention of the Dissenters 
[Was to destroy the churches. 

By this kind of false witness it became possi- 
ble to rouse the passions of an ignorant mob, 
^and it is clear that some who ought to have 



38 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 

known better were not altogether averse from a 
lesson being read, by some sort of mob violence, 
to people whom they considered schismatics 
and revolutionaries. They did not indeed in- 
tend that it should go to the length to which 
it actually went, but as usual the forces they 
had aroused soon got beyond their control ; 
and however much they might wish to stop the 
outbreak when it got beyond a certain point, 
they found themselves quite unable to do so. 

It seems to me that whoever, in support of 
any cause, appeals to the prejudices and pas- 
sions of a mob, is committing a crime. It is a 
very dangerous thing to have a mass of violent 
ignorance in our midst, and the effort of all 
educationists, and all social workers, is to 
endeavour to remove this ignorance ; but so 
long as it exists, its stirring up is a great 
responsibility. So far as I am able to judge 
from the past, a mob has generally been utilized 
in favour of the forces of vested interests and 
what is called "reaction" or putting back the 
clock. 

Mob law is always bad law. A mob is 
actuated by prejudices and superstitions, not 
by intelligence and reason. A mob stirred up 



RIOTING 39 

I by priests is liable to be an agent of cruelty 
and blasphemy ; and, from the days of " Crucify 
Him " until now, has always — I think always — 
taken the wrong side. 

The immediate outbreak at Birmingham 

began in connexion with a public dinner at an 

hotel, presumably '* The Olde Royal/' in 

Temple Row. A number of gentlemen met 

there to celebrate the anniversary of the taking 

of the Bastille — the beginning of the French 

' Revolution, which many enlightened people in 

this country, including the poet Wordsworth, 

s regarded as a movement fraught with hope 

I and goodwill to mankind. The excesses and 

1 crimes of the later revolution, and its collapse 

: into military empire, could not of course be 

: foreseen. 

; Priestley, as a matter of fact, did not go to 
; the dinner : he appears to have had nothing to 
[ do with it, but was playing backgammon at 
I home with his wife in his own back parlour. 
J But the mob assembled outside the hotel, all 
the same, and at a given signal (the signal being 
; the cry ** Church and King ") the windows in 
) front of the hotel were broken. Then, being 
[ assured of Priestley's absence, they swept away 



40 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 

to the New Meeting House, which they assailed, 
we are told, with incredible fury. 

The gates and doors were soon burst open, the pews 
demolished, the cushions and fragments carried out and 
burnt in front of the building, and at length fire was carried 
in which consumed it to the outer walls. The mob was now 
roused to frenzy. Some of the magistrates strove to quell 
the riot, and even those who had connived at the outrage 
grew alarmed at the dangerous temper which they had 
aroused. But the infuriated rabble by this time was 
thoroughly out of control, and no sufficient force was at 
hand to cope with it. The Old Meeting-house was next 
demolished, with the regularity of workmen employed for 
the purpose. A party armed with crow-bars, bludgeons, 
etc., tore down the pulpit, pews and galleries, and burnt 
them in the burying-ground, afterwards setting fire to the 
body of the meeting-house. 

By no means satiated with these exploits, 
they now marched in a body to Priestley's house 
at Fair Hill, the cry of " Church and King " 
being again raised ; and though it did not belong 
to Priestley, but to a gentleman who, we are 
told, was deservedly a favourite of the poor, 
yet, because it was the dwelling of Dr. Priestley, 
it was doomed to destruction, and was attacked 
with the most savage and determined fury. 

Priestley's personal escape was due to the 
foresight of a friend, Mr. Samuel Ryland, wh 
had just managed to hurry him and Mrs, 






BIRMINGHAM RIOTS 41 

Priestley into a chaise, and on to the house of 
a friend at a smaU distance, Mr. Russell. Here 
a room for the night was prepared, and the 
doctor was expressing thankfulness in being 
permitted to lie down in peace and comfort, 
when Mr. Russell hurried in to say that the mob 
had become more violent than ever ; that they 
now swore to find Dr. Priestley and take his 
life, and were coming in search of him with 
shouts of " Stone him." The chaise was again 
brought out, and they drove off, scarcely knowing 
whither to go. Next day he intended to set off 
on horseback for Worcester, to catch the Lon- 
don mail ; but the fugitives lost their way on a 
common between Heath Forge and Bridge- 
north and wandered about all night. They 
managed however to reach Kidderminster in 
the early morning, and were there met by Mr. 
Ryland, so that ultimately they got away to 
London. 

As a result of the activity of the mob, " Showell 
Green was destroyed, as were Bordesley Hall 
and Moseley Hall, and other houses in the 
vicinity of Moseley ; Mr. Ryland' s house at Easy 
Hill, and Mr. Hutton's house in High Street 
and his country seat at Wash wood Heath." 



42 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 

Ultimately, the magistrates being powerless 
to deal with the rioters, the soldiers were sent 
for, and the mob retreated to its dens. 

The attitude exhibited to these events bjij 
people in authority indicated a curious mixture 
of disapprobation and satisfaction ; and, reading 
between the lines, one perceives that the result 
was not whole-heartedly regretted. For in- 
stance, the King, George III, writing to Mr. 
Secretary Dundas in approval of dragoons 
having been sent to Birmingham to quell the 
tumult, thus continues : 

Though I cannot but feel better pleased that Priestley 
is the sufferer for the doctrines he and his party have 
instilled, and that the people see them in their true light, yet 
I cannot approve of their having employed such atrocioui 
means of showing their discontent. 



M 



The attitude of Priestley himself to these 
extraordinary persecutions, which overburdened 
his wife with anxiety and permanently ruined 
her health, is indicated by the following letter 
or Memorial which he addressed to his late 
co-citizens : 

To THE Inhabitants of the Town of Birmingham. 

" My late Townsmen and Neighbours, — After living 
with you eleven years, in which you had uniform experience 
of my peaceful behaviour, in my attention to the quiet 



BIRMINGHAM RIOTS 43 

studies of my profession and those of philosophy, I was 
far from expecting the injuries which I and my friends 
have lately received from you. But you have been misled. 
By hearing the Dissenters, and particularly the Unitarian 
Dissenters, continually railed at, as enemies to the present 
government in Church and State, you have been led to 
consider any injury done to us as a meritorious thing ; and 
not having been better informed, the means were not 
attended to. When the object was right you thought the 
means could not be wrong. . . . 

You were prepared for every species of outrage, thinking 
that whatever you could do to spite and injure us was for 
the support of Government and especially the Church. 
In destroying us you have been led to think you did God 
and your country the most substantial service. 

HappUy the minds of Englishmen have a horror of 
murder, and therefore you did not, I hope, think of that, 
though by your clamorous demanding of me at the hotel 
it is probable that at that time some of you intended me 
some personal injury. But what is the value of life when 
everything is done to make it wretched ? In many cases 
there would be greater mercy in despatching the inhabit- 
ants than in burning their houses. However, I infinitely 
prefer what I feel from the spoiling of my goods to the 
disposition of those who have misled you. 

You have destroyed the most truly valuable and 
useful apparatus of philosophical instruments that perhaps 
any individual in this or any other country was ever pos- 
sessed of, in my use of which I annually spent large sums, 
with no pecuniary view whatever, but only in the advance- 
ment of science, for the benefit of my country and of man- 
kind. You have destroyed a library corresponding to 
that apparatus which no money can re-purchase, except 
in a course of time. But what I feel far more, you have 
destroyed manuscripts, which have been the result of the 



44 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 

laborious study of many years, and which I shall never be 
able to recompose ; and this has been done to one who 
never did, or imagined you, any harm. 

And that there was something more in the 
disturbance than merely mob violence, at any 
rate in the opinion of contemporary people oi 
importance, is indicated by the following lettei 
from Josiah Wedgwood to Priestley : 

If the brutality had arisen merely from the ungovem'c 
madness of a mob [composed of] the lowest order of our 
species one would then lament all its effects like those of a 
storm or hurricane, but if there is reason to believe that the 
rabble were acted upon and encouraged to such proceedings 
by those who should be their superiors, one cannot but 
perceive the too evident spirit of the times, or of the place, 
at least, by which you and so many of your worthy neigh- 
bours have suffered. 

The times, however, were naturally somewhat 
violent. The French Revolution must have 
been exciting intense interest, and, I should 
suppose, a good deal of alarm among the Party 
who at that time imagined itself to represent 
aristocratic opinion. For instance, Mr. Matthew 
Davenport Hill tells us of an instance whiclAl 
shows that feeling ran high, and that even so 
apparently loyal and harmless a toast as 
" Church and King " had become an instru- 



BIGOTRY 45 

ment of offence ; — which is not to be wondered 
at, seeing that it was that cry to which the 
riotous mob had responded on the occasion just 
described, for reasons which to its inteUigence, 
if it had had any, would have been quite unin- 
telligible, 

" The years following the riot of 1791," he writes, 
" witnessed various displays of hostile sentiment. At a 
municipal dinner shortly after that event . . . Dr. Parr was 
present, though the sturdy divine must have surmised that 
he would be the only representative of his opinions. The 
cloth being drawn, the chairman proposed, as the Doctor 
no doubt expected, the toast of ' Church and King.' 

" Parr instantly started to his feet, proclaiming in a 
stem voice his dissent. ' No, sir,' said he, ' I will not drink 
that toast. It was the cry of Jacobites, it is the cry of 
incendiaries. It means a Church without the Gospel, and 
a King above the Law.' " 

Such was the trouble of the times that even 
in London Priestley's position was very insecure. 
He could hardly persuade a landlord to take 
him as a tenant, for fear his house would be 
demolished ; and though he tried to continue 
his chemical work and his preaching, the ran- 
cour of his enemies made life intolerable. He 
was, in point of fact, boycotted ; servants 
were afraid to remain long with him, and the 
tradespeople hesitated to take his custom. He 



46 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 

was several times burnt in effigy, with Thomas 
Paine ; and gross caricatures, in which he 
was described as " the treacherous rebel and 
Birmingham rioter," were exhibited. He re- 
ceived insulting letters likening him to Guy 
Fawkes, and to the devil ; some coming from 
people calling themselves ministers of the 
Gospel. In one of these he was threatened with 
being burned alive before a slow fire. 

Burke inveighed against him in the House 
of Commons, and many of his associates in the 
Royal Society shunned him. 

In those days the Government did not hesitate 
to take strong measures against any unpalatable 
reformer ; and a Mr. Thomas F. Palmer, a highly 
respectable gentlemen in Bedfordshire, had 
been sent to Botany Bay for seven years be- 
cause he had published a paper in favour of 
Parliamentary Reform. 

In answer to remonstrances, and urgings to 
leave the country, from his friends, Dr. Priestley 
writes as follows : 

After the riots in Birmingham, it was the expectation, 
and evidently the wish of many persons, that I should 
immediately fly to France or America. But I had no con- 
sciousness of guilt to induce me to fly from my country. 

Ill-treated as I thought I had been, notmerely by the 



EMIGRATION 47 

populace of Birmingham, for they were the mere tools of 
their superiors, but by the country in general, which evi- 
dently exulted in our sufferings, and afterwards by the 
representatives of the nation, who refused to inquire into 
the cause of them, I own I was not without deliberating 
upon the subject of emigration. 

I hoped to have had no occasion for more than one, 
and that a final, remove. But the circumstances above 
mentioned have induced me, though with great and sincere 
regret, to undertake another, and to a greater distance than 
any I have hitherto made. . . . And I trust that the same 
good Providence which has attended me hitherto, and made 
me happy in my present situation, and all my former ones, 
will attend and bless me in what may still be before me. 
In aU events the will of God be done. 

Further life in England had now become 
intolerable, and emigration had to be faced. 
Accordingly on April 8, 1794, Priestley and his 
wife set sail from London, and on June 4 they 
arrived in New York. 

His friend and scientific opponent, Lavoisier, 
had met with even worse treatment at the 
hands of his ungrateful country. Sentence had 
been pronounced upon him, with the infamous 
ejaculation " the Republic has no need of 
chemists," and Lavoisier was executed by the 
guillotine. 

Such was the treatment bestowed on the best 
of their citizens by two nations which considered 



48 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 

themselves as without exception the most 
civiHzed and enhghtened in the world. 

At New York Priestley was well received ; 
addresses of welcome were presented to him, 
and he was offered the Professorship of Chemis- 
try ill the University of Philadelphia. But he 
preferred to live in the country ; and his wife, 
who had never recovered from the shock of the 
Birmingham riots, needed rest and quiet. He 
declined therefore to take up any teaching work 
again, but spent his time in the laboratory or 
study — for the most part composing theological 
works, and repeating with enthusiasm and 
eagerness the experiments of Volta then being 
published. 

He was now, however, aged seventy, and it 
was evident that his end was not far off. He 
was anxious to live six months longer, he told 
his physician, in order that he might complete 
the printing of his works. 

On February 4, 1804, he finally took to his 
bed ; though he was still able to read proof sheets 
and check Greek and Hebrew quotations. In 
the evening he had his grandchildren brought 
to his bedside, saying that it gave him great 
pleasure to see the little things kneel. 



HUXLEY'S OPINION 4g 

He lingered through the night, and in the 
early morning requested his son to take down 
some additions and alterations he wished in- 
serted in his proofs, dictating as clearly and 
distinctly as he had ever done in his life. 
When these were read to him he said, " That is 
right, I have now done." Shortly afterwards 
he put his hand over his face and breathed his 
last, so easily that those who were sitting close 
to him hardly perceived that he had passed 
away. 



In 1874 a statue of Priestley was erected by 
the inhabitants of Birmingham, and on that 
occasion Professor Huxley gave an address 
which appears as the first of his Essays on 
Science and Education. To everything in 
that volume I heartily commend the attention 
of readers, and with some of the opening words 
of that address we may fitly conclude this 
biographical sketch. 

If the man to perpetuate whose memory we have 
this day raised a statue had been asked on what part of 
his busy hfe's work he set the highest value, he would 
undoubtedly have pointed to his voluminous contributions 
to theology. . . . 

L.F.M. E 



50 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY 

In this cause he not only cheerfully suffered obloquy 
from the bigoted and the unthinking, and came wittiin 
sight of martyrdom ; but bore with that which is muc|i 
harder to be borne than all these, the unfeigned astonisl^ 
ment and hardly disguised contempt of a briUiant society, [ 
composed of men whose sympathy and esteem must have 
been most dear to him, and to whom it was simply incom- 
prehensible that a philosopher should seriously occupy 
himself with any form of Christianity. 

If appears to me that the man who, setting before 
himself such an ideal of life, acted up to it consistently, 
is worthy of the deepest respect. . . . 

But our purpose to-day is to do honour, not to Priestley 
the Unitarian divine, but to Priestley the fearless defender 
of rational freedom in thought and in action : to Priestley 
the philosophic thinker ; to that Priestley who held a fore- 
most place among " the swift runners who hand over the 
lamp of life," and transmit from one generation to another 
the fire kindled, in the childhood of the world, at the Pro- 
methean altar of Science. 




II 



GEORGE DIXON 

Born, 1820. Came to Birmingham, 1838. Died, 1898. 

By George H. Kenrick 

George Dixon, the son of a Whitehaven man, 
was born at Gomersall, Yorkshire, in 1820. 
He was educated at the Leeds Grammar School, 
and spent two years in France learning the 
language. In 1838 he came to Birmingham 
with his brother and joined the firm of Rabone 
Bros. In 1844 he was made a partner and subse- 
quently became the head of the firm in which 
he remained all his life. In 1855 Mr. Dixon 
married the daughter of the late James Stans- 
feld, judge of the County Court of Halifax. In 
1863 Mr. Dixon entered the Council as member 
for Edgbaston Ward. Three years later he was 
elected Mayor, November, 1866. In July of 
the following year he resigned his office to be- 
come a candidate for Parliament on the death of 
Mr. William Scholefield, and was duly elected 
on the 23rd of that month by a majority of 
1,605 votes. In 1873 Mr. Dixon was elected on 
the School Board and became chairman in 1876, 



52 



GEORGE DIXON 



when he was compelled to retire from Parlia- 
ment, owing to the state of Mrs. Dixon's health. 
In 1885 he contested the Edgbaston Division of 
the Parliamentary borough and was returned by 
a majority of 1,191, and he continued in Parlia- 
ment until his death in 1898. 

Such is the brief chronicle of the life of one 
whom Birmingham may well regard as one of 
its greatest citizens. It is to me at once an 
honour and a pleasure to be allowed to speak 
of one whom I regard as a kind of educational 
godfather, since it was he who introduced me 
to public life in relation to education. And, 
indeed, it is as an advocate of education that 
Mr. Dixon will be recollected in the future. 
Had it not been for this bent of his mind he 
might well have been remembered as typical 
of the best kind of commercial greatness. Keen, 
broadminded, well informed, scrupulously hon- 
ourable, he was well fitted to raise the tone and 
enlarge the sphere of commercial dealing, and 
he speedily put his firm in the front rank of 
Birmingham merchants. As a town councillor, 
and subsequently Mayor, he showed himself by 
his generous sympathy and by his wise actions 
to be possessed of all those qualities that have 



I 



EDUCATION AID SOCIETY 53 

distinguished the great EngHsh towns in their 
admirable self-government, and on his election 
to Parliament he was probably the most popular 
man in Birmingham. 

But his devotion to education overshadowed 
all these things, and in the future George Dixon 
and the people's schools will always remain 
connected. No doubt, were he living to-day 
the secondary school and the University would 
have his constant attention and devotion, but 
in his day the problem of the education of the 
masses forced itself to the front, and pushed 
aside all other educational problems. 

The first intimation we have of the interest 

of Mr. Dixon in the question was shown when 

he was Mayor in January, 1867. He then 

summoned a private conference at his house, at 

■ which it may be said all the leading men of the 

' town without distinction of party or sect were 

' present to consider what could be done to 

remedy the want of education, then so striking 

'. a feature of our great towns. My father was 

present, and I well recollect his telling us how 

. surprised he was at finding so many discordant 

' elements joined in a common cause. The time 

' was ripe for the movement, and in March of the 



54 GEORGE DIXON 

same year a public meeting was held in the 
Town Hall, at which was formed an Education 
Aid Society similar to one at that time existing 
in Manchester. 

The Society raised a considerable annual 
income, most of which was spent in paying the 
school fees of the children, for the schools of 
Birmingham, deficient in number as they were at 
that time, were by no means crowded. There 
were places for about 30,000 children, but another 
25,000 places were required before it could be said 
that there was room for every child in the town. 
But the Society did much towards ascertaining 
the actual facts concerning these matters, and 
still more in rousing public opinion. 

Mr. Jesse Collings became the honorary 
secretary of that society, and I need not tell 
you that the Society did not go to sleep. Mr|j 
Dixon himself, in some most remarkable words 
used by him at the meeting in 1867, showed 
that he at any rate fully grasped the magnitude 
of the situation. These words — more or less 
varied — have been used by so many speakers 
since then that they have become almost th< 
watchwords of education in England, and 
make no apology for quoting them again. 



NATIONAL EDUCATION LEAGUE 55 

It was most important that they should seek in all 
educational work that they took in hand, to make the 
ultimate end of that work a gradation of schools — schools 
that is, not uniform, not of the same character, but so 
diverse that they should be adapted to the wants of every 
class of the community, from the richest down to the very 
lowest, and that they should be so easy of access from the 
lower schools to the higher that they should feel that there 
was not one boy in Birmingham, however low in the school, 
or however indifferent his parents might be to his education, 
if he had really those natural powers which would enable 
him to profit in an extraordinary degree by the advan- 

. tages offered, who would have anything in the shape of 
a barrier put in the way of his progress upwards, even to 

' the highest honours of the University. 

It would have been an immense pleasure for 
I Mr. Dixon to have been told that his views, so 
clearly and so early expressed, have since then 
been realized, and that one at least of those boys 
coming from the bottom of the elementary 
school has gained the highest honours of the 
( University of Cambridge. 

! It was not long before the Education Societies 
; had prepared the way for a much bolder scheme, 
i and in 1869 the " National Education League " 
■ appeared with Mr. Dixon as chairman, and Mr. 
Chamberlain, Mr. George Dawson, Dr. Dale, 
'. Mr. Jesse CoUings, Mr. William Harris and 
many others among its local supporters, and a 



56 GEORGE DIXON 

fund of £14,000 subscribed by twenty gentlemen 
for the furtherance of its objects. 

Its objects were concisely stated as " The 
establishment of a system which shall secure 
the education of^ every child in the country," 
and the means recommended were admirably 
clear. 

1. Local authorities shall be compelled by 

law to see that sufficient school accom- 
modation is provided for every child in 
their district. 

2. The cost of founding and mamtaining such 

schools as may be required, shall be 
provided out of local rates, supplemented 
by Government grants. 

3. All schools aided by local rates shall be 

under the management of local authori- 
ties and subject to Government in- 
spection. 

4. All schools aided by local rates shall be 

unsectarian. 

5. To all schools aided by local rates admission 

shall be free. 

6. School accommodation being provided, 

the State or the local authorities shall 
have power to compel the attendance of 



PROGRAMME OF LEAGUE 57 

children of suitable age not otherwise 
receiving education. 

To show what leading people thought of the 
plan it is enough to state that before any public 
meetings were held, 2,500 names were on the 
roll of the Society. Then local committees 
were formed in all the large towns, and the great- 
est enthusiasm prevailed. The League had a 
subscription of over £6,000 a year, besides sums 
raised locally. 

The first general meeting of the League was 
held in October, 1869, in the Birmingham 
Assembly Room, when Mr. Dixon presided. Arch- 
deacon Sandford moved the adoption of the 
report, and warned the members that they must 
be prepared for opposition, saying, " I am quite 
satisfied that very many severe things will be 
said of your platform. We shall be told no 
doubt that it is a godless scheme ; that it is a 
revolutionary scheme ; that it is a scheme 
utterly unsuited to the taste and feeling of the 
British people ; that it cannot succeed ; and 
that if carried out it will flood the land with 
atheists and infidels." 

Later in the meeting a resolution was carried 
urging that a bill should be prepared for pre- 
sentation in the next session of Parliament. 



58 GEORGE DIXON 

The conference ended with a great meeting 
in the Town Hall, when Mr. Chamberlain, Mr. 
Mundella and Professor Fawcett were among 
the speakers. 

Mr. Dixon threw himself into the campaign 
with enthusiasm, sometimes presiding at the 
meetings — there were over loo held before the 
introduction of the Bill — and always counselling 
the numerous adherents of the League in which 
his parliamentary experience served him well. 

It would take too long to go further into the 
work of the League. It lasted for eight years, 
and in its earlier period it was actively served 
by many prominent citizens of Birmingham, 
including of course Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. 
Jesse Collings, and not forgetting Mr. Bunce. 
Perhaps few movements of modern times had 
so much work put into them in so short a time, 
and its fiery activity soon had the effect of 
starting opposition " Unions," one in Birming- 
ham and one in Manchester. 

Archdeacon Sandford's prophecy was soon 
fulfilled, and the controversy was long and 
strong. But in the end the programme ol 
the League has triumphed, and of its sis 
articles as enumerated above, all but one are 



GLADSTONE'S GOVERNMENT 59 

now in force, and even that one, " all schools 
aided by local rates shall be unsectarian," 
applies to about half the schools in England and 
Wales. 

Nothing to my mind is a clearer proof of 
the sound sense and the foresight of Mr. Dixon 
than the acceptance by him of this programme 
at a time when he at least knew all about the 
opposition that it would invoke. Mr. Dixon 
had spent a good deal of time in Australia, and 
it is probable that he found there conditions 
regarding education among English people — 
for at that time they were more English than 
they are now — suggesting to him what might 
be acceptable in time even in England itself. 
At this time Mr. Gladstone's government of 1868 
was in power. It was a Whig government, and 
had but little of the democratic spirit which has 
since permeated both political parties, but the 
influence of the agitation could not be denied, 
and Mr. Forster, the Vice-President of the Council 
representing the educational policy of the Govern- 
ment, undertook to introduce a bill dealing with 
the whole subject. Thereupon Mr. Dixon, who 
had been preparing with the officers of the 
League a bill upon the subject, and had an- 



6o GEORGE DIXON 

nounced his intention in Parliament of proceed- 
ing with it, undertook to suspend further action 
pending the production of the Government 
bill. 

It seemed, indeed, as though the League 
were extraordinarily fortunate. It had only 
been in existence for a few months, and here was 
the Government of the day about to introduce 
under the guidance of Mr. Forster, a Noncon- 
formist, and in those days a Radical, a measure 
which was to carry into effect the principles 
which it had been advocating. It sounded 
too good, and events soon proved that it was 
a very different matter from what was expected. 

I do not propose to traverse at great length the 
discussion and eventual passing of the Bill. It 
was, no doubt, a momentous period in Mr. 
Dixon's life, for he was one of the protagonists 
in the fight, not so much as an ardent sup- 
porter — the position he hoped to occupy — but 
as a critic and the mover of amendments. 

The Government Bill was hesitating and ineffi 
cient. Compulsion was left to the locahties ; 
School Boards were only to be created where 
there was manifest want of schools, and the 
denominations were given one year of grace 



THE BILL OF 1870 61 

in which to supply deficiencies ; fees were 
to be continued, but under certain conditions 
School Boards could grant remission. But 
worst of all, instead of conferring with the 
League, Mr. Forster had consultedthe" Unions." 
He had, in fact, bought off the opposition, but 
had paid too high a price. 

Mr. Dixon, with the assent of the League, 
moved an amendment on the second reading, 
and it was seconded by Mr. Illingworth, a most 
unusual course for a supporter of the Govern- 
ment, and one that did not fail to call forth 
complaint from Mr. Forster. 

Three nights were occupied in its discussion, 
and in the end, after the promise of certain con- 
cessions, Mr. Dixon withdrew his amendment. 

In Committee Mr. Dixon was untiring in his 
efforts to persuade the Government to accept 
more of the programme of the League, one of 
the results being the celebrated Cowper-Temple 
clause, whereby in what we now call provided 
schools, no dogma nor catechism peculiar to 
any denomination can be taught at the public 
expense, and another being the application of 
the ballot in the election of School Boards. 

On August 9 the Act received the Royal 



62 GEORGE DIXON 

Assent, and during the autumn of 1870, the 
first School Boards were elected. 

It is perhaps difficult now to understand the 
bitter disappointment of the friends of the 
National Education League, but that it was both 
deep and wide may be gathered from the subse- 
quent party history, and also from the fact that 
Mr. Forster, in his own constituency, had to 
submit to the following vote of censure: 

" That this meeting, having heard Mr. Forster's 
account of his parliamentary services during 
the past session, and fully recognizing his pre- 
vious services to the Liberal cause, regrets its 
inability to approve of the educational measure 
passed mainly by his exertions, and deep! 
deplores the means resorted to, to secure it 
adoption in a Liberal House of Commons 

Nevertheless, bearing in mind subsequent 
events, it appears that Mr. Forster took a truer 
view of the whole situation than did the leaders 
of the National Education League, who, if they 
had persisted in their programme might have 
delayed any substantial Education Act for 
another ten years. Mr. Forster's Act, hesitating 
and feeble as it was, did lead to an immense 
activity in education, and to an expenditure 



1 



THE RELIGIOUS DIFFICULTY 63 

certainly far greater than was expected by Mr. 
Dixon and his friends. 

Since that date two important measures, the 
Bill of 1896 and that of 1906, although proceed- 
ing from different sides of the House, have both 
been withdrawn, owing to the strong opposition 
roused by them, and the Act of 1902, while it 
admittedly has done much for education, has also 
laid the foundation of a widespread discontent, 
which every one agrees must be dealt with and 
satisfied before very long. 

It is not too much to say that education, harm- 
less and attractive as it appears, is a deadly sub- 
ject for the politician, and this is explained by 
the fact that the feelings aroused in connexion 
with it are among the strongest that exercise men 
and women. It is now nearly forty years since 
the Act of 1870 was passed, and the struggle 
emphasized by the '' Leagues " and " Unions" 
of those days still goes on, and apparently must 
go on until our system of education is of a more 
national character than it is at present. But 
at the same time education goes on and has 
stretched out until it has reached every child in 
the kingdom, and indeed until a generation of 
those trained in public elementary schools, has 



64 GEORGE DIXON 

arisen, of whom it may be said that their educa- 
tion, for the most part, is equal to what passed 
for secondary education thirty years ago. More- 
over, under the Act of 1902, a vast amount of 
the secondary education in the kingdom has 
passed under the control of elected bodies and 
become subject to a very careful inspection 
by the Board of Education. There has thus 
been opened up from the elementary school to 
the University the path so clearly indicated by 
Mr. Dixon in 1867, that may be followed by 
those who have the natural powers to enable 
them to take advantage of it. 

It is always interesting to speculate how the 
situations of to-day would have been dealt with 
by those who are no longer with us, but to 
whom we know that such situations would; 
have strongly appealed. 

It may well be asked how Mr. Dixon would 
have regarded our problems, and it may be 
worth while referring to some of his speeches in 
order to ascertain from them his views. 

In the first place, let us consider what may be 
called the problems. They are mainly two. 

I. The question of rate contribution to schools 
only partially under local control. 



DENOMINATIONAL SCHOOLS 65 

2. The future position of all public schools. 

Since the Act of 1902 there has always existed 
a strong feeling against rate contribution under 
these conditions in certain influential quarters. 
This has manifested itself in the passive resistance 
movement, and has moved the present Govern- 
ment to introduce two bills, with the object of 
overcoming the difficulty. 

Now, the Education League did not find itself 
contemplating the present position of affairs. 
It provided that " all schools aided by local 
rates shall be unsectarian," but while doing so 
evidently expected that many schools would 
not be so aided, and this was exactly what 
happened until 1902. 

In 1876 Mr. Dixon introduced a bill to estab- 
lish School Boards, in areas already provided 
with sufficient schools, with power to accept 
the existing schools just as they were, and appar- 
ently without the Cowper-Temple clause, and 
among his arguments in favour of this plan he 
urged that it might be accepted now, but later 
on the Nonconformists would probably object 
to it, and demand that in every such district a 
school should be built *of the ordinary Board 
School type of that day. 

L.F.M. F 



66 GEORGE DIXON 

Mr. Dixon, therefore, suggested that the 
Church of England party should make haste to 
accept such an offer while it was still available. 

The bill was rejected by the House, but found 
a considerable number of supporters, and to me 
it is quite clear from this that Mr. Dixon would 
have been prepared to accept any proposition 
that moved in the direction of his idea as to 
the ultimate position of the education question. 

What was that position ? 

There is no doubt that Mr. Dixon expected 
a very large diminution of the denomina- 
tional schools in regard to which he invented 
the phrase, " painless extinction," that will 
always be associated with his name, meaning 
that from time to time as the transfer of such 
schools became less repugnant to the managers, 
such transfers would be made. His continual 
use also of the phrase a " national system " 
clearly indicates that he contemplated the great 
majority of schools being conducted under public 
management on undenominational lines. But 
he was far too good an educationist to wish to 
crush individuality where it was really strong 
and vital, and he was far too good a student of 
human nature to desire to curb every effort of 



HOPES FOR A NATIONAL SYSTEM 67 

strong natures by the steel of one uniform code. 
I think he would have been well satisfied if 
75 per cent, of the schools had fallen into line, 
and would have been tolerant as to the remainder, 
provided that the education given was always 
up to the mark and did not become slack under 
the guise of being religious. 

Looking through some of his earlier speeches 
on the subject of education, I have been struck 
with one or two particularly interesting remarks. 

Speaking at Rochdale in 1873, he says : 

There is no greater loss of wealth to a country than 
an uneducated people ; never, therefore, let the idea of 
economy come between you and a high class and universal 
education. 

In 1874 Speaking locally and on the question 

of an increase of rates : 

The educational rates will rise and possibly some little 
regret will be expressed about it. That will be the time 
for you to be no longer silent, but to tell such persons that 
the education thus being provided for the children of the 
present generation was an education not merely worth the 
money paid for it, but worth any sum the town could 
pay for it. Whatever we are called upon to pay we shall 
receive back again. 

In 1876, in Parliament, when introducing his 

Bill he said: 

But it always appeared to me that it was a great ad- 
vantage in any district that there should be only one 



68 GEORGE DIXON 

governing body and not a multiplied number of governing 
bodies. I should be very glad if in our boroughs all the 
powers of the Town Council, the School Board and the Board 
of Guardians were thrown into one body and if in the 
country districts also we could have one governing body 
into which you could throw the duties of administering 
the affairs of the whole locality. 

Also in 1879 3. propos of increased rates he 

said : 

In the event of the voluntary schools in Birmingham 
being handed over to the Board is. 2d. might be reached, 
but I do not think that would be exceeded, in fact it would 
probably not be reached because all the schools would 
not be handed over. 

The schools are not handed over now, but 
the expenses are, and these, together with second- 
ary and evening schools and other items notf i 
existing when Mr. Dixon spoke, have raised 
our rate to is. 6^d. for 1908. 

Passing from these political topics, it is a 
relief to come back to the subject of local admin- 
istration in which Mr. Dixon took a prominent 
part since he was a member of the School Board 
from its beginning in 1870 until he resigned in 
1896, and became chairman when Mr. Chamber- 
lain went into Parliament in 1876. Birmingham 
was one of the towns in which the largest 
deficiency of school buildings was found, and 



THE BIRMINGHAM SCHOOL BOARD 69 

no time was lost in erecting buildings in various 
parts of the town, nor was there any difficulty 
in making them of a size which has continued 
to be the type of Birmingham schools ever since. 
The schools are for about 1,000 children. 

With so large a number of important schools 
under its management, the Birmingham Board 
was able to take a leading part in guiding other 
Boards throughout the country, and with Mr. 
Dixon at its head there was no difficulty in shap- 
ing a policy liberal in its views, but very full 
of common sense in working out its problems. 

Mr. Dixon was always for providing whatever 
was considered best at the time, feeling, no 
doubt, how much behindhand we were, even in 
our ideas, and foreseeing the time when our first 
schemes would be considered quite too paltry, 
and would require remodelling. In this he was 
abundantly justified, and the plans of many of 
the schools have been altered at the request of 
the very Department which twenty years before 
would never have allowed such alterations to 
be made. 

Another maxim of Mr. Dixon's was that of 
experiments. He said that it was always 
necessary to be making experiments in every 



70 GEORGE DIXON 

of them failed, but without experiment there 
was no life and no progress. 

One of his experiments was that of the Bridge 
Street Technical School. Mr. Dixon said he 
would find the building if the Board would allow 
some of the brighter boys from the elementary 
schools to be drafted into this building where 
they might be taught science and mechanics, 
and remain beyond the usual leaving age. 

The Department consented, and even helped 
Mr. Dixon by promising substantial grants, so 
that little cost might fall upon the ratepayer. 
The school was a great success. Clever boys 
were readily found, and they received an excel- 
lent training in science, which at that time was 
hardly to be found in any secondary school. 
The experiment was repeated elsewhere, and 
School Boards in most of the large towns took 
up the work with enthusiasm, so that secondary 
schools of a new and valuable type were set 
up in many parts. At a later period came the 
Technical Instruction Act, which enabled Town 
Councils to provide education of this character, 
and when this Act was endowed with the "beer 
money " it became a fruitful source of education 



TECHNICAL INSTRUCTION 71 

of a new kind, including instruction in the even- 
ing. Mr. Dixon's school was largely responsible 
for this, for it clearly indicated that talent existed, 
and plenty of it, if it could only be allowed to 
find its way to the right place. 

A blow at this kind of education was given 
by the Cockerton judgment, but that only made 
it easier to insert in the Act of 1902 certain very 
wide provisions, regarding secondary education, 
of which large advantage has been taken. 

To any one who knew Mr. Dixon, to say 
that he was " thorough " would be superfluous. 
No one could talk with him without seeing 
that he completely grasped every problem before 
he dealt with it, and although it might cost him 
much time to really get at the bottom of things, 
he did not grudge such time, and never forgot 
what he had acquired. As a leader of a party 
he was a model. Always ready and eager to 
greet the success of any of those working under 
him, he never relaxed his own efforts, and 
was always spurring us on to fresh activity. I 
well remember when he asked me to become a 
member of the Board that he pointed out that 
I should find plenty to do in two fields. "Look 
after the games and exercises," he said ; " there is 



72 GEORGE DIXON 

nothing being done in that direction — and look 
after the attendance, it is very poor." 

To-day games and exercises are constantly 
being pressed upon us by the Board of Educa- 
tion, though not, perhaps, so much in Bir- 
mingham, for we have had them for many 
years. As for attendance, that of the elementary 
school is now pretty much up to the standard 
of the secondary school, and whereas we used 
to be content with anything over 70 per cent., 
now we expect something over 90 per cent. 

When in 1885 Mr. Dixon again returned to 
Parliament, his long apprenticeship to the admin- 
istration of elementary schools gave him immense 
advantage, and he was constantly referred to 
as an authority on all such matters. 

Mr. Dixon's courtesy towards all those with 
whom he came in contact was always a theme 
upon which people in Birmingham loved to 
dwell, and it undoubtedly contributed to that 
trust in his honesty and fairness which prevailed 
throughout the city. 

There was also a simplicity in his character 
that was very charming, and he frequently told 
stories at his own expense, into the enjoyment of 
which he thoroughly entered. 



ILLNESS AND RETIREMENT 73 

When at length his illness compelled him to 
retire from the Board, he still retained his inter- 
est in what was going on, and was glad to see his 
old colleagues, and hear what was being done, 
and this intense love of what had been the work 
of his life he retained up to the end. 

I said at the beginning that Mr. Dixon would 
be regarded as one of Birmingham's greatest 
citizens. I hope that I have said something 
to induce you to share that feeling, and I 
believe that many years will elapse before we 
shall be able to boast of one who devoted his 
talents and his fortune so wisely to the city of 
his adoption. 



GEORGE DAWSON 

Born in London, 1821. Came to Birmingham, 1844. 
Died, 1876. 

By a. W. W. Dale 

I 

It is a true instinct — if I may venture to say so 
— that has led those who arranged for this course 
of lectures to set us to speak about men rather 
than movements or events; for it is men who 
make the City or the State, not laws, not 
institutions. Men make the convictions that 
the laws express, and without men to work 
them, the best of institutions is but an engine 
without the power that moves it. 

You have asked me to speak to you about 
one of those who helped to make this city what 
it is, and I will try to tell you what I can of 
George Dawson ; what kind of man he was, 
what kind of work he did, and what of aim, 
ideal, example and inspiration, he has left to 
those who come after him. 

How clearly, how vividly, he stands out in 
memory ! The mass of iron-grey hair heavily 



76 GEORGE DAWSON 

streaked with white, nearly covering his ears, 
quite covering his broad, low forehead ; bushy 
eyebrows nearly straight, and beneath them dark 
brown eyes that twinkled and flashed and blazed 
and melted ; the nose straight or nearly so ; the 
mouth partly hidden by a straggling beard, — 
firm, but not so firm that it could not curve with 
scorn or quiver with emotion. The face was 
lined and seamed — the face of a man who had 
known many sorrows, who had carried his own 
burden of care, and the burden of others also. 
His voice, when he spoke to you, was full and 
deep and rather husky — the voice of a man who 
had struggled and suffered, who had known dis- 
appointment and defeat in the service of great 
causes and in the pursuit of noble ideals. There 
was a note of scorn in it at times, a note of pity 
in it always. The man himself of middle height, 
broad and sturdy, slow in the movements of 
the body, swift in the movements of the head. 
And, lastly — one of the little things — almost al- 
ways a velvet coat, or at least a velvet waistcoat, 
with a necktie that was any colour but white. 
In short, a man thoroughly unclerical, unpro- 
fessional, unusual, altogether unlike ordinary 
men. If you saw him in a crowd, you would 



EARLY YEARS 77 

have marked him out ; if you had heard him 
speak, you would have watched him and waited 
for him to speak again. In other words, a man 
with strong, attractive — one might say magnetic 
— power. Such was George Dawson in the 
later years of his life. But he was a young --nan 
when he came to Birmingham, and he came with 
the fire and freshness of youth. All that 
need be said about the history of his life can be 
put into a few sentences : the life itself was 
neither eventful nor long. 



II 

He was born in London on February 24, 1821, 
in one of those obscure streets that converge on 
Brunswick Square. London, no doubt, is an over- 
rated place ; but Birmingham, after all, owes 
something to it, for London gave Birmingham 
three, at least, of the men who, in recent times, 
have done most to shape its life and thought — 
George Dawson, Joseph Chamberlain, and a 
third whose name I need not mention. 

George Dawson's father, Jonathan Dawson, 
conducted what was then known as " a high-class 
academy " — we should call it a good private 



78 GEORGE DAWSON 

school, — and for more than thirty years he pros- 
pered in his calUng. He was a Baptist, a man 
of simple faith and simple life. It was natural 
that the son should be brought up in his father's 
school, and he remained there till he was six- 
teen. It was natural, too, that he should be 
drawn into the Baptist ministry, for seventy 
years ago there were few other callings open to 
the son of a Nonconformist who loved books 
and all that books stand for. 

So, Oxford and Cambridge being closed to him 
as a Nonconformist, Dawson went North, entered 
the University of Aberdeen, and then, a year 
later, transferred himself to Glasgow where he 
spent three years, 1838-41, graduating with 
honours at the close of his course. Then, for 
the best part of two years, he served in his 
father's school as an assistant master — "usher " 
they would have called it then. During that 
time he preached occasionally in various Baptist 
meeting-houses, and among others in a little 
chapel at Rickmansworth, in Hertfordshire. 
In 1843 he was invited to become its pastor, and 
accepted the invitation. He was never ordained 
to the ministry, and he never took any systema- 
tic course in theology as a preparation for it — 



GRAHAM STREET 79 

two facts worth remembering, for the second, at 
any rate, throws some Hght on his later history. 

At Rickmansworth he spent only a few months, 
for on August 4, 1844, he preached his first 
sermon in Mount Zion Chapel, Graham Street, 
afterwards to be associated with the work and 
memory of Charles Vince, the best-beloved, 
perhaps, of all the Birmingham ministers of his 
time. When the office-bearers of the church 
asked Dawson on what terms he would come, 
his reply was characteristic : — " Bread and 
cheese for the first year," he said, " afterwards 
what I am worth." He was not the man to 
drive a bargain, and he had faith enough in him- 
self and his powers to feel sure that when a church 
— an intelligent church — had found what he 
had to give them, they would be eager to offer 
what he would have been slow to ask. In 
the ministry, at any rate — the ministry of all 
churches — the man who covets money is not the 
man who gets it. 

And then trouble came. The Graham Street 
church had trust deeds ; the trust deeds con- 
tained a creed ; and Dawson soon found himself 
in revolt against the creed that he was bound 
to teach. You will not expect me to enter into 




8o GEORGE DAWSON 



the theological differences that arose. The sub- 
stance of them may be stated briefly. The 
creed of the church laid stress on the salvation 
of man by our Lord's death : Dawson laid stress 
on the salvation of man by our Lord's life. 
The church thought of Him as the divine Media- 
tor : Dawson thought of Him as the divine 
Example. That is a rough and ready statement 
of facts, but you may take it as fairly accurate. 
As a rule, theological differences, when they 
arise, produce more heat than light, and con- 
troversy is apt to bring out the baser and meaner 
side of the best of men ; for, unfortunately, it 
is true that all gentlemen are not Christians, 
and, still more unfortunately, that all Christians 
are not gentlemen. But this case was an excep- 
tion, and both those who stood by the church 
and those who stood by the minister parted, 
at the end of 1845, without rancour and without 
malice, which did honour to both sides alike. 

His friends — and he had made many in less 
than eighteen months — were determined not 
to let him go. They joined together to build a 
new chapel for him under conditions that should 
ensure perfect freedom, and in August, 1847, the 
Church of the Saviour was opened, based on 



CHURCH OF THE SAVIOUR 8i 

these principles : that no pledge should be 
required of minister or congregation ; that 
no form of theological belief should be implied 
by membership ; that difference of creed 
should be no bar to union in practical 
Christian work. In that church George Dawson 
carried on his work for nearly thirty years. 
How the principles worked out in practice, and 
to what extent his pastoral work was lasting, I do 
not attempt to inquire. It is enough to know this 
— that he drew round him hundreds and thou- 
sands of men and women who would have found 
no religious home elsewhere ; and that from his 
teaching they gained such strength, and such 
hope, and such repose of heart as they needed, 
and such hold as might be on the things that 
belong to eternity and not to time. 

And now he settled down to the work of his 
life — his religious work in the church, as preacher 
and pastor, his intellectual work as a lecturer 
and teacher, his public work as a citizen and a 
patriot. It will be convenient to deal separately 
with these three fields or provinces of service. 
But you must allow me to handle them broadly 
rather than in detail, leaving much to be filled 
in by yourselves. 

L.F.M. c 



82 GEORGE DAWSON 

III 

First, let me speak of his work in the pulpit 
and the church. If I were to pass it by in silence 
it would be a sorry compliment to you ; for it 
would suggest unwillingness to listen to opinions 
that you may not share : it would be a dishonour 
to him ; for it would degrade the work in which 
he manifested his finest powers to a secondary 
and subordinate place. And so I shall make 
bold to speak freely, but, I hope, with no lack 
of sympathy or of charity. 

It must be remembered that Dawson was not 
a trained theologian. He had never been put 
through a course of systematic theology. It 
may be doubted if he ever constructed for himself 
a definite system of belief. He cared more for 
spirit than for substance — more for feeling than 
for form. He would have sympathized with the 
words of a great German divine who denounced 
the exhibition of what was known as the Holy 
Coat of Treves — " The Founder of the Christian 
religion bequeathed to His apostles and disciples 
— not His coat, but His spirit. His coat belongs 
to the executioner." 

Dawson was less unorthodox than many people 
imagined. But against tradition — the tradition 



EVANGELICAL MOVEMENT 83 

that benumbs and petrifies — he was ever in revolt. 
His first impression on the pubHc mind, when he 
began his ministry, was made by attacking 
EvangeHcahsm — the traditional, though not' 
perhaps, the real faith. Far be it from me to 
disparage or to underrate what the Evangelical 
Revival had done for the spiritual life of the 
nation in earlier days. It flooded the world with 
a new ardour of devotion. It transfigured and 
transformed the souls of men with the passion 
that inspired the faith of the early Church. 
When the Wesleys and Whitefield went through 
the kingdom with the Gospel that had come 
to them, the divine grave, open in the ages 
of faith and sealed in the ages of doubt, was open 
once more ; and the churches which they quick- 
ened recovered the strong and simple faith of 
the Church of the Resurrection. But the divine 
fire died down. The revelation that had inspired 
one generation became the orthodox tradition 
of the next. What once had been a living faith 
degenerated, in part if not altogether, into a 
thing of words, phrases, conventions. Dawson 
saw the surface, though he did not see the heart ; 
and he hated and despised what he saw. He 
struck for reality — for reality in every part of 



84 GEORGE DAWSON 

life ; for reality in religion, which is the crown 
of life. He knew that no generation can thrive 
merely on the religious experience of those who 
have gone before ; that to keep the soul strong 
and sound, a man must get his spiritual food 
day by day. So was it with the manna which 
the children of Israel gathered in the wilder- 
ness, " the corn of heaven," as the Psalmist calls 
it — " when man did eat angels' food." It was 
of the day, and for the day : if kept to the mor- 
row, it " bred worms and stank." That is a 
law, an abiding law, of the spiritual life. Daw- 
son's revolt against the Evangelical tradition 
was due not to any want of faith, but to his con- 
viction that religion, if it is to be of any avail, 
must be intimate, spontaneous, natural, and 
direct. And this should be reckoned to him for 
righteousness. 

There was another line of cleavage. It would 
be rash to assert that the earlier Evangelicals 
held that religion had nothing to do with con- 
duct ; but the tendency of the school, among 
its later adherents, was to lay stress on the 
negative, rather than on the positive side of the 
principle. If a man did not dance, did not play 
cards or billiards, did not go to the theatre, did 



UNWORLDLINESS 85 

not read plays or novels, he was accounted a 
religious man. If he did any of these things, 
he was set down as a worldly man. Dawson 
made short work of these artificial distinctions 
and of the ingenious compromises that grew out 
of them. To his mind, what a man did was 
far more important than what he abstained 
from doing. '' What doest thou more ? " is the 
question that we have to answer — not " What 
doest thou less ? " A man might obey the law 
of prohibition — the law " Thou shalt not " — in its 
minutest details, and yet be far from the king- 
dom of heaven ; for true unworldliness is not of 
the letter, but of the spirit. He would have 
accepted, without reserve, the definition of un- 
worldliness that some of you may have read 
elsewhere : " Unworldliness does not consist in 
the most rigid and conscientious observance of 
any external rules of conduct, but in the spirit 
and temper, and in the habit of living created 
by the vision of God, by constant fellowship 
with Him, by a personal and vivid experience 
of the greatness of the Christian redemption, 
and by the settled purpose to do the will of God 
always, in all things, and at all times." That 
was the substance of Dawson's own teaching 



86 GEORGE DAWSON 

from the very first. But when he began his 
ministry, the men and women who had been 
trained to walk in the old ways were not ready 
to grasp the new truth. 

There was another element in Dawson's 
preaching that should not be overlooked — the 
vigour and the force with which he dwelt upon 
the everyday duties of life. One who heard him 
often in his early days used to recall Dawson's 
freedom and freshness in dealing with the com- 
mon faults and failings of common people. 
Religion, as Dawson understood it, was concerned, 
not with a bit of a man's life, but with the whole 
of it. There are seven days in the we^k, and 
not one ; and Dawson's sermons were not for 
Sunday alone, but for week-days as well. Hugh 
Latimer did not shrink from plainness of speech 
in the pulpit, neither did he. 

He would talk to his congregation about scales and 
about yard measures, about tea and sugar, about adul- 
terated mustard, and about butter half of which was 
fat, about stock-taking and long credit, about dressing 
shop windows, about all the details of the doings of a 
scoundrel who had been tried a day or two before for his 
transactions in connexion with a fraudulent stock 
company, about dress and jewellery, about dinners and 
evening parties, about all the follies and sins and vanities 
of the day. 



il 



ETHICAL PREACHING 87 

He spoke of the facts of life as they were ; of 
the world as it was, and not as some people 
would have liked it to be, with half the grim facts 
of experience suppressed and ignored. For if 
life is to be made sound and straight, we must 
know the moral and physical laws by which life 
is governed. We must know the law and under- 
stand the law if we are to obey the law ; and it 
is only in obedience that we find our safety and 
our strength. His preaching was effective because 
it was in touch with realities, and because he 
was real himself. And the inner secret of his 
power was this — if I may borrow a sentence from 
my old friend, Mr. G. J. Johnson — that Dawson 
** was not a preaching man, but a man preach- 
ing." Or, to put the truth in another way, 
he preached not " as a dying man to dying men," 
— that was the old idea of preaching — but as a 
living man to living men who found life no 
simple or easy matter. Preaching of that type 
was a new thing at that time. Since then, others 
have learnt the secret ; and I venture to say 
that in two such books as The Ten Command- 
ments and The Laws of Christ for Common Life, 
you will find the fruit and the flower of the seed 
that George Dawson had sown. 



88 GEORGE DAWSON 

Some people then held that, a sermon, to 
deserve the name, should deal only with such 
themes and mysteries as — 

Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate ; 
Fixed fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute. 

They held that to bring the business of the 
week into the stillness of the sanctuary was to 
profane the temple. And others resented such 
preaching from baser motives. There was an 
American minister who went down into the 
Southern States after the war, and for obvious 
reasons set himself to preach a good deal about 
morahty. He began to expound the Ten Com- 
mandments. When he had reached the fourth 
or fifth, a deputation came to him from the con- 
gregation. They thanked him for all that he 
had done, and expressed their deep personal 
esteem for him ; but they asked him whether 
he would mind preaching his sermons on the 
rest of the Commandments at the week evening 
service, when only the devout were present, 
instead of on the Sunday when saints and sinners 
were mixed; "for," said they, "we think — 

Religion never was designed 
To make our pleasures less." 



JOURNALISM 89 

There were some in Birmingham who might 
have said the same ; there were others who, if 
they had said what they thought, would have 
altered a word in the old lines : 

Religion never was designed 
To make our profits less. 

To such as these his preaching was unwel- 
come. But the mass of the people heard him 
gladly ; for he spoke to them as one who knew 
their difficulties, their temptations, and their 
struggles ; and he had a gospel to give them by 
which they could live. — All men are grateful for 
that. 

IV 

Let me next speak of Dawson's work as a 
teacher and lecturer. However opinion may 
differ as to the effect of his preaching, there can 
be little difference as to his unrivalled power to 
awaken and enlighten. I say this, not forget- 
ting the fact that on three separate occasions 
he became the editor of a daily newspaper 
— the Mercury in 1848, the Daily Free Press 
in 1855, and the Morning News in 1871. But 
it may be said in extenuation that these 



90 GEORGE DAWSON 

lapses were brief and at long intervals, and 
that the newspapers which he edited soon 
came to confusion, if not to liquidation. No 
one — not even the most thorough-going of his 
admirers — would claim for him that he was a 
great editor. But no one who heard him would 
deny his charm as a lecturer. Charles Kingsley, 
who had little love for Nonconformists, and even 
less knowledge of them, described Dawson as 
" the greatest talker in England " ; Mr. Johnson, 
whom I have already quoted, said that " talking 
came to him as easily as breathing." He was 
a talker, not an orator. He attempted no 
sustained intensity or elaboration of utterance 
— not even the elaboration that achieves sim- 
plicity. In speaking, whether in the pulpit or 
on the platform, he spoke as he might have 
spoken to half a dozen friends gathered round the 
fireside. The style was easy, natural, intimate, 
unstudied, and direct. The tone varied, and so 
did the mood. He might slip from indignation 
to pathos, or from humour to disdain, in swift 
succession ; but he never shouted and he never 
stormed. It was talk — talk at its best ; it was 
not declamation. And the talk was never hazy, 
but always clear. 



LUCIDITY 91 

Some men think in a fog and speak in a fog, 
and the fog soon spreads from the man who speaks 
to the men who listen. For if you are to have 
any chance of making yourself understood by 
others, the first condition of success is that you 
should understand yourself. Now Dawson 
always understood what he wished to say at the 
time when he said it ; and those who heard him 
— if they were persons of ordinary intelligence — 
understood it too. What he thought, what 
he said, this week might be different from 
what he would think and from what he would 
say next week ; for his estimates and judgments 
varied with his moods, and though his balance was 
not an unjust balance, the scale that sank down 
heavily to-day might kick the beam to-morrow. 
It was sometimes difficult to reconcile what he 
was saying with what he had said before — partly, 
no doubt, because he was content to say one 
thing at a time, without much heed of qualifica- 
tions and conditions ; but there was never any 
difficulty in following what he said while he was 
saying it. For he had learnt one thing that 
some men never learn — the relation of the speaker 
to the listener. What was said of John Brad- 
ford, the old Puritan preacher, might have been 



92 GEORGE DAWSON 

said with equal truth of George Dawson. Brad- 
ford, we are told, " was a master of speech, but 
he had learned not to speak what he could 
speak, but what his hearers could hear. He 
knew that clearness of speech was the excellency 
of speech ; and therefore resolved like a good 
orator to speak beneath himself rather than 
above his audience." Aim low if you mean to 
hit your mark : that is the speaker's first 
law. 

Dawson commenced to lecture, in 1845, and 
he went on lecturing to the very end of his 
life. It would be an exaggeration to say 
that like Bacon he took all knowledge for 
his province ; but there were few subjects in 
literature or in life that he did not touch. I 
spare you a catalogue in detail, though I could 
take up several minutes with the list. When 
I say that he ranged from Calvin at one end to 
Benvenuto Cellini at the other, from Rousseau 
to Beau Brummel, from Tennyson to Voltaire, 
from " Ill-used men " to " Church decora- 
tion," from the music of Mendelssohn to the 
pictures of Holman Hunt, you can form some 
idea of the ground that he covered ; and if 
there was a great movement stirring the 



INTERPRETER 



93 



hearts and the hopes of men, or a great event 
that seemed likely to become a landmark in 
history, Dawson had his say about it. He went 
up and down the country with his lectures, 
and his voice was heard in every city throughout 
the land. 

In those days when books and magazines 
and newspapers were far fewer and less accessible 
to ordinary people than they are to-day, his 
coming was an event, and he quickened the 
minds of those who heard him in little country 
towns with a force that lasted and leavened long 
after he had gone away. He taught people, not 
of set purpose, but by suggestion, what to read 
and how to read ; and he took them to the great 
books that are best worth reading. For a great 
book not only teaches and inspires, it reveals. 
At the heart of every great book is a man ; and 
the book reveals the man who wrote it to the 
man who reads it. It also reveals the man who 
reads it to himself. And the harvest of a great 
book is not only what we find in it, but what it 
helps us to find in ourselves, Dawson was the 
most skilful of interpreters, in showing men what 
to look for and where to find it. 

When he died the Spectator described him as 



94 GEORGE DAWSON 

the most famous intellectual " middle-man " of his 
day. If it spoke without any deliberate con- 
tempt, it certainly spoke with a certain air of 
patronage, such as we are accustomed to expect 
in a newspaper that has always had a Moses of 
its own to go up into the mount on every 
Thursday afternoon and to bring back with 
him the infallible oracles of heaven for Satur- 
day's ** leader." But to be a " middleman " — 
even in literature and philosophy — is no re- 
proach. The man who can make plain to the 
many the thought of the one, who can enable 
them to hear, each in his own tongue, the words 
of wonder (which are the works of wonder) — 
such a man, to fulfil his mission, must be endued 
with a double gift of insight, wisdom, and sym- 
pathy. For he must be able to think and feel, 
and speak, not in one world, but in two. He 
must be akin to genius, the genius of the poets, 
prophets and sages of our race, on the one hand, 
and akin to poor commonplace humanity on 
the other. And he must be able to express 
the mind and the emotion of the immortals 
in the bare and broken speech that belongs to the 
creatures of a day. That was what Dawson did 
for thousands of unlettered men and women. 



EUROPEAN FREEDOM 95 

And as they listened their eyes were opened to 
the glory of the world : — 

Hesperus with the host of heaven came. 
And all creation widened on their view. 

There is another service that Dawson rendered 
in broadening thought and sympathy to which 
I must refer in passing. When he began his 
public work, the average Englishman, still under 
the influence of the reaction that followed the 
French Revolution and the wars of Napoleon, 
knew little, and cared less, about the movements 
for liberty and enlightenment in other lands. 
He believed that freedom was good for Britons, 
and that " Britons never should be slaves." 
But as for other nations — " the nations not so 
blest as we " — he was not quite sure that they 
were fit for freedom, or that they could be trusted 
to use freedom if they got it. 

But Dawson believed with his whole heart that 
freedom was good for all, and not only for Eng- 
lishmen. He was the first man in Birmingham 
to study and to understand foreign politics, and 
to raise a genuine interest in the affairs of 
Hungary, Italy and France. He welcomed 
Kossuth, the great Hungarian leader ; he was 



96 GEORGE DAWSON 

the friend of Mazzini, and of Garibaldi, who 
together helped to make the free and united 
Italy of to-day. His heart went out to the men 
in France who led the ineffective revolution of 
1848 ; and to those who withstood the tyranny 
and the corruption that were avenged at Sedan. 
He was a patriot ; but there was nothing paro- 
chial in his patriotism ; he gave others some- 
thing of his own broad outlook. And a man's 
convictions and enthusiasms are fullest, deepest 
and strongest, when they are fed, not from the 
narrow range of personal, or local, or even 
national experience, but from the wide water- 
shed of the world. 



V 

And now, in the last place, I pass on to speak 
of the debt that this city owes, as a city, to Daw- 
son's work and teaching. It is the hardest part 
of my task, because there is so much to say, 
and also because it involves some knowledge of 
municipal history. But if you will bear with me 
for a few minutes more, I shall do my best to put 
the case briefly before you. 

Dawson came to Birmingham in 1844. Five 



INCORPORATION— AND AFTER 97 

years before, in 1839, the borough had received 
its charter of incorporation. But the vahdity 
of the charter was contested. The overseers 
refused to levy a borough rate. And it was not 
until August, 1842, that the charter of incorpora- 
tion was finally confirmed by statute. Even 
then, power was still divided between the borough 
council and other local authorities ; for there 
were four sets of commissioners who exercised 
control in different parts of the town for various 
purposes ; and it was not till 185 1 that the 
powers hitherto vested in those separate bodies 
were consolidated and transferred to the town 
council, establishing it as the sole governing 
authority for municipal purposes. 

The conflict had been long and severe. The 
reformers, when they had won their victory, were 
worn out and exhausted. They had neither spirit 
nor strength left to initiate a new and vigorous 
policy and to enter upon a fresh campaign to 
carry such a policy into effect. They were 
content, for the moment, to encamp upon the 
ground that they had won. The Town Council 
itself had little energy or enthusiasm. It was 
not without men of character and ability; but 
they had no definite aim, and no bond of union. 

L.F.M. H 



98 GEORGE DAWSON 

Their policy — if it can be called a policy — was to 
move slowly, and to do as little as they could. 
Those of you who have read the report on 
the state of the town drawn up by Mr. Rawlinson 
for the Board of Health in 1849, will know how 
much there was to do. Even in the better parts 
of the town the sanitary conditions were dis- 
graceful. In Hagley Road and in Bristol Road 
house drains discharged into the open gutters 
of the street. In George Street — as it was then 
called — the sewage of the houses ran into the 
canal. Many houses in the same district drew 
their water supply from wells that were separ- 
ated only by a few feet from a cesspool or a 
midden. And in the less prosperous parts of 
the borough the state of affairs was even worse. 
Duddeston and Nechells had a surveyor of 
their own. They paid him £-^0 a year. He 
described himself as a " universal genius, "though, 
as he said, " he never had no instruction," 
and " never could see that there was any art in 
laying down sewers." He did not know how to 
use a spirit-level, and took his levels with three 
sticks. Even in the centre of the town the 
streets were mean and sordid, badly paved, and 
badly lighted. Two gas companies supplied 



THE AGE OF DARKNESS 99 

the town, but on such terms that prices were 
not lowered by competition. Further out, row 
upon row of grimy dwarf houses extended in 
all directions ; and behind the streets lay two 
thousand close courts, each approached by a 
narrow passage and doorway — for the most part 
without pavement or drainage, as indecent 
within as they were unwholesome. The burial 
grounds attached to the churches and chapels 
of the town were full to overflowing. Wells 
contaminated by the filth that was left to soak 
into the soil supplied two-thirds of the popula- 
tion. A water company supplied the remaining 
third on two days in the week. Disease was 
rife, and the death-rate high. Whole districts 
in the heart of the town were abandoned to vice 
and to crime. 

That is a dark picture, is it not ? Dark, but 
not over-coloured : every line in it is confirmed 
by bluebooks, reports and records : if you will 
examine the evidence for yourselves, you will 
agree that I have exaggerated nothing. Bir- 
mingham in those days was nothing better than 
an overgrown and ill-governed village. 

There was work enough for the most ardent 
of municipal reformers. But Dawson's vision 



100 GEORGE DAWSON 

passed beyond the limits of conventional reform. 
To him a city meant something besides the 
policeman and the scavenger : it had larger 
and higher functions than to maintain public 
order and to provide for the public health. 
For a city, as he conceived it, was a society, 
established by the divine will, as the family, 
the State, and the Church are established, for 
common life and common purpose and common 
action. It was not a bundle of individuals — 
not '* a mere aggregation of individual bipeds," 
as Coleridge puts it, but an organism with 
definite functions to discharge ; functions that 
grow in range and in importance as the city 
rises from its humble beginnings, and advances 
in power and dignity and fame. This truth 
was one that he held and set forth and main- 
tained throughout his public life. In the noble 
address that he delivered at the opening of the 
Reference Library in 1866 he said only what he 
had often said before. That library, as he viewed 
it (I give you his own words), " was the first- 
fruits of a clear understanding that a great town 
exists to discharge towards the people of that 
town the duties that a great nation exists to 
discharge towards the people of that nation ; 



THE NEW CIVIC IDEAL loi 

that a town exists here by the grace of God ; that 
a great town is a solemn organism through 
which should flow, and in which should be shaped, 
all the highest, loftiest, and truest ends of man's 
intellectual and moral nature." 

" Not by bread alone " — we all know that. 
Man does not live by bread alone, nor by law 
alone, nor by politics alone. And when we 
have done all that we can for his comfort, his 
health, his security, and for the health, comfort 
and safety of those who are dear to him, we 
have touched only one side of his nature, have 
not ministered to all his wants, have not given 
him all that he has a right to claim : mind and 
spirit have needs of their own as well as the 
body ; and those needs must be satisfied. This 
means that the city which is a city must have 
its parks as well as its prisons, its art gallery as 
well as its asylum, its books and its libraries as 
well as its baths and washhouses, its schools as 
well as its sewers : that it must think of beauty 
and of dignity no less than of order and of 
health. 

Such was the task that Birmingham had 
before it when Dawson first set himself to preach 
the new municipal gospel ; some of it obvious, 



102 GEORGE DAWSON 

even then, and some of it at that time a dim 
and distant ideal. You know in what wonderful 
ways it has been put into practice. You can 
estimate for yourselves how much Birmingham 
owes to Dawson for his share in the achievement. 
Let me indicate — it is all that I can do — the 
lines on which he worked. 

In the first place, he stoutly maintained that 
the principle of individual freedom must be sup- 
plemented by the principle of collective respon- 
sibility, and that the policy of " let-alone,'' at 
that time the dominant idea, was bad for the 
city and bad for the state. The voluntary 
system, he was convinced, has its limits. Public 
duties are not to be left to private enterprise. 
In the administration of justice, private enter- 
prise degenerates into Lynch law. In other 
cases private enterprise means that men shirk 
their share of burdens that belong to all, and 
leave the whole burden on the shoulders of a 
few. If a man will not do his duty by love, 
** then," said Dawson, " make him do it by 
law." To " the fat, double-chinned prosperous 
people who have no public spirit in them, and 
who take all they can get from their country, 
and give nothing for it," the rate-collector and 



THE DUTY OF PUBLIC SERVICE 103 

the tax-gatherer are ministers of grace. Inter- 
ference with the Hberty of the subject ? That 
is why he hked it. He rejoiced to see that kind 
of Hberty — hberty to shirk pubhc duty — cur- 
tailed. " Bondage is better than hberty," said 
he, " if hberty means the shirking of duty, the 
neglecting of other people, and simply the getting 
all you can out of your country, and putting it 
into your own pocket and giving none." 

In the second place, he laid stress upon the 
duty of personal service. If a man had leisure, 
if he had wealth, if he had been trained in the 
management of affairs, those advantages, those 
privileges, carried with them duties to corre- 
spond. If a man had the ability to serve the 
town in public work, he was bound to serve. 
For the city needs its best men ; and if the best 
men hang back and hold aloof, then the business 
of the city will not be done as it should be. 
Inferior men are not the men to lead. *' Never 
send a man into the Council," said Dawson, 
*' whom you would not like to be Mayor." If a 
man is not fit to lead, the interests of the city 
are not safe in his hands. 

Thirdly, he insisted that the business of the 
town should be transacted not only with hon- 



104 GEORGE DAWSON 

esty but with dignity. Those of you who are 
old enough to remember how and where pub- 
He affairs were discussed and settled in earlier 
days will understand how necessary it was to 
drive that principle into men's minds. 

I have told the story of the Woodman else- 
where : but to some of you it may be new, and 
I shall venture to tell it again. Even after the 
old system had begun to pass away, it was still 
the custom of certain prominent members of 
the Council to meet at the Woodmaii, a well- 
known tavern in the town, and to discuss the 
Council business in a kind of informal caucus. 
There was nothing against the house. It 
was not a drunken Woodman, or a dissolute 
Woodman ; but it was a beery and a gin-and- 
watery Woodman. The habit was, to say the 
least, undignified, and it was keenly resented 
by the men of the new school. Direct 
protest would have done more harm than 
good ; but at last an opportunity for pro- 
test came. It was at the time when the 
country rose in arms to support Mr. Plimsoll's 
demand that the Government should take 
action against unsea worthy ships. A town's 
meeting was held in the Town Hall, presided 



I 



THE "WOODMAN" 105 

over by the Mayor. Mr. Vince — who always 
fought smiHng — was one of the speakers. He 
reminded the meeting that the sailor's whole 
life was bounded by his ship. It was his home 
and his prison, his free library and his art 
gallery. "And if, Mr. Mayor," he continued, 
"he wants to spend an hour in the parlour of the 
Woodman, the ship must be his Woodman too." 
The Mayor of the day was understood to be 
one of the most regular frequenters of the tavern, 
and the thrust was received with a tumult of 
laughter. Then suddenly the laughter stopped ; 
the audience saw the reproof that the jest veiled, 
and with one impulse they began to applaud 
steadily — I might say solemnly, and they 
continued to applaud for several minutes. The 
hour of judgment had come for the Woodman, 
and all that the Woodman stood for. That 
night the town set up a new standard of dignity 
for its public men. 

I shall not try to follow the course of the 
movement. It began, as all such movements do, 
in the dream of solitary and silent hours. Then 
it made its way into the minds of a few men of 
kindred spirit. And the dream became an ideal ; 
and the ideal grew into a conviction ; and con- 



io6 GEORGE DAWSON 

viction flamed into enthusiasm ; and enthusiasm 
took shape in poHcy, and passed from the study 
and the club to the platform and the pulpit, and 
swept through the wards of the city, and fired 
men's minds and kindled their hearts, until 
the ideal that had once been a dream had become 
a reality. Those years in which the new gospel 
began to spread and to prevail — those glorious 
hours of crowded strife — can we ever forget 
them ? 

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive ; 
But to be young was very heaven. 

Other men had their part in the work. Others 
did more to apply principles in practice. But 
Dawson came first. He led the way where 
others followed. And for myself, I hold in 
highest honour the man who is first to see when a 
great reform is needed, and first to point out 
how reform may be effected. Others may flock 
round the standard he has raised ; others may 
devise methods and details of policy ; others 
may inscribe the new law in the statute-book : 
we are debtors to all of them. But we owe 
most to the man who first believed — and 
taught others to believe — that reform was pos- 
sible. Such is the debt that this city owes to 



OUR DEBT AND ITS DISCHARGE 107 

George Dawson for what it has achieved in per- 
fecting and purifying its municipal hfe, and 
for the nobler ideals and aims of civic duty 
that it has followed with steady purpose and 
unfaltering faith. 

VI 

And now that I have spoken of the man and 
his work, let me ask you how you are acknow- 
ledging, how you are repaying the debt that 
you owe him ? Is the old spirit still alive in 
this place ? May a man still say the thing he 
will, and be sure of a hearing, even if he con- 
fronts alone the prejudice and passion of the 
hour ? Are your best men still ready to spend 
themselves in the service of the city ? And when 
the best offer for service, do you accept the offer 
that they make ? When you have chosen your 
leaders, do you give them your hearts with your 
votes ? And do you stand by them staunchly 
and loyally, through good repute and through 
evil, through water and through fire ? Are 
there still among you some men, many men, 
who care httle for the things that concern the 
pocket, and much for the things that concern the 
mind and the spirit ? Have you a few men still 



io8 GEORGE DAWSON 

who dream dreams and see visions, and who 
upHft the Hves of others by their loftier ideals ? 
Are your hearts tender for the armies of the 
homeless and unfed, for those who are out of 
the way, and for those who are ready to perish ? 
Are you eager, in a spirit of divine compassion, 
to seek and to save ? If this be so — if *' the 
silent voices of the dead " are the voices that 
you heed and obey, then George Dawson's 
work abides, and he has served not only the 
generation for which he laboured until he fell 
on sleep, but generations untold that are yet 
to be. 



JAMES WATT 

Born in Greenock 1736. Came to Birmingham 1774. 
Died in Birmingham 181 9 

By F. W. BURSTALL.i 

Before I proceed to deal with James Watt I 
want to give a picture of the times before his 
great engine was invented. 

The idea of using the elastic force of steam 
was not new, as it had been proposed for the 
purpose of draining mines by the Marquis of 
Worcester in the time of Charles II, but only in 
a vague form which never reached the practical 
stage. 

Papin was the first to propose the use of the 
piston working in a cylinder, and shortly 
afterwards Savery used an ingenious arrangement 
of vessels which were alternately filled with 
water and steam for the purpose of pumping : 

^ Professor Burstall's lecture loses more than any of 
the others owing to the impossibility of reproducing the 
admirable series of slides with which he illustrated it. 
With his permission I have inserted short passages 
(pp. 111-114, 116-117, 117-118), chiefly on the authority 
of Smiles' s Life of James Watt, in further explanation of 
some of the circumstances mentioned in the text. 



109 



no JAMES WATT 

the Savery engine is still used for low lifts under 
the name of the Pulsometer. 

The first real pumping engine which was 
successfully employed was that invented by 
Newcomen, a Devonshire blacksmith, which 
became widely used throughout Devonshire 
and Cornwall for draining the copper and tin 
mines and to some extent for pumping in the 
coal mines of the Midlands. 

The engine consisted of a cylinder fitted with 
a movable piston and connected to the boiler 
by a pipe and valve. During the outward stroke 
of the piston the valve was opened, so that 
steam filled the cylinder ; at the end of the 
stroke the steam valve was shut and a jet of 
cold water injected into the cylinder which 
produced a vacuum and forced down the 
piston. At first the two valves were opened 
and shut by a boy attendant. Later Humphrey 
Potter arranged for the engine to become self- 
acting. 

The Newcomen engine was brought to a high 
pitch of perfection before the time of Watt. 
Smeaton built several of large size, one of which 
had a fifty-inch cylinder and was used for drain- 
ing the Chasewater mine in Cornwall. 



I 



A WORKMAN'S DIFFICULTIES iii 

The great objection to the Newcomen engine 
was the enormous quantity of coal that was 
consumed, which made it a question as to whether 
it was not better to close down the mine rather 
than keep the engine working. 

James Watt was brought up to the trade of 
an instrument maker, and learned his trade 
in London making compasses, sextants, and 
other instruments required in navigation. He 
then went to Glasgow, his native town, to set 
up for himself as an instrument maker. 

In spite of all that is said in praise of modern 
civilization and of modern industrial methods, 
it is sometimes urged that the workers have 
made no substantial advance towards individual 
liberty. The early struggles of James Watt tell 
a different story. Before going to Glasgow he 
had experienced the hardships that could be 
inflicted upon the working-man by an imperfect 
system of police and by the regulations of a 
trade guild. We can hardly realize the terror 
inspired by press-gang men and by kidnappers 
in the employment of the East India Company 
and the planters of America. Like other peace- 
able citizens at that time Watt lived in dread 



112 JAMES WATT 

of seizure, legal and illegal. In London he 
had found a berth in the shop of a mathematical 
instrument maker, though without binding him- 
self to the usual seven years' apprenticeship. But 
between the press-gang and the guild regulations 
he was kept in constant fear of capture and exile. 
In 1756 he wrote to his father, ** They now press 
anybody they can get, landsmen asweUas seamen, 
except it be in the liberties of the city, where they 
are obliged to carry them before the Lord Mayor 
first, and unless one be either a 'prentice or a 
creditable tradesman, there is scarce any getting 
off again. And if I was carried before my Lord 
Mayor I durst not avow that I wrought in 
the city, it being against their laws for any 
unfree man to work even as a journeyman 
within the liberties." It was doubtless the 
opinion of the time that these restrictions were 
necessary to safeguard the workers' standard 
of life. But the fact that they have all 
been swept away, that the worker's standard 
is higher and more secure to-day than ever 
before, suggests that we ought not to be 
too dogmatic respecting the necessity of any 
particular means for the attainment of such a 
desirable end. 



FREEDOM OF WORK 113 

The same obstacle that threatened Watt in 
London threatened him again in Glasgow. In 
trying to learn his trade he was again beset with 
difficulties. He tried to establish himself in 
business only to find himself a " stranger" : he 
was neither the son of a burgess nor had he 
served an apprenticeship within the borough. 
There were at that time no makers of mathe- 
matical instruments in the town, yet the Guild 
of the Hammermen, jealous of their rights, re- 
fused to allow him to open a business. In vain he 
besought the Guild to permit him at least the use 
of a small workshop in which to experiment. For- 
tunately a way was opened from another quarter. 
At this stage in his career the University of 
Glasgow, to its lasting credit, came to the rescue 
of the future inventor. Within the precincts 
of the University buildings the Professors exer- 
cised an absolute authority. Watt was already 
known to the Professor of Natural Philosophy, 
by whom he had been employed to repair some 
instruments that had recently been bequeathed 
to the University. The Senate now determined 
to offer him an asylum from the tyranny of the 
Guilds, and a workshop was fitted up for him in a 
room in the inner quadrangle. This room was 

L.F.M. I 



114 JAMES WATT 

kept sacred to Watt until, in my own under- 
graduate days, the University was removed to 
its present site. In addition a shop was appro- 
priated to his use in the front of the College 
buildings which faced the High Street. The 
University, it is pleasant to think, was dedicated 
to freedom of work as well as freedom of 
thought. 

It was this accident very largely which 
caused Watt to turn his attention to the 
steam engine. It so happened that one of 
the professors, named Anderson, had among 
his models one of the new engine, which was 
out of order, and this was sent to Watt so 
that he might repair it for Professor Anderson. 
Most ordinary mechanics would, no doubt, 
have acted very differently. Having repaired 
it they would have returned it and thought 
no more about it. But James Watt was one 
of those men who could not resist the tempta- 
tion to find out what was inside. He made 
repeated attempts to get the model to work but 
could not succeed, because the quantities of 
steam were insufficient for the purpose. He 
mentioned this to the celebrated Dr. Black, who 
enUghtened Watt on the theory of the weight 



THE FIRST STEP 115 

of steam and gave him a scientific insiglit into 
its general properties. A great deal was done 
to get the model to work, but nothing came of it . 

James Watt tells the story how he came to 
make the invention. He relates how as he 
was walking down the College Green towards 
Greenock the thought suddenly came into his 
head— why not separate the condenser from the 
cyhnder ? It was thus that he made the first 
great step in his invention. This was in 1765. 
The next step was to make this invention into a 
commercial possibility, and here were all the 
drawbacks and all the difficulties which every 
inventor has to meet. It was impossible for 
him to go very far. To construct an engine 
to demonstrate its usefulness, meant capital, and 
Watt himself was a poor man. 

The first man to take up the invention was 
a Dr. Roebuck, who was then trying to start 
the Carron Ironworks. Roebuck encouraged 
Watt and found a considerable amount of 
capital. A small engine was constructed, but 
here came the great difficulty which handicapped 
Watt in his efforts to bring his engine to com- 
pletion. There were in those days no tools 
of precision. The workmen were unskilled in 



ii6 JAMES WATT 

manufacturing models to the degree of nicety 
that was required to make the engine a success, 
and the whole of the first set of engines that was 
supplied was a failure owing to the fact that he 
could not get his piston steam tight. There were 
no boring tools available ; the methods were 
of the roughest description, and to produce 
accurate work was very nearly an impossibility. 
From 1765 until 1769 the engine dragged 
on a more or less miserable existence. Watt 
himself rapidly lost heart, being by nature timid 
and cautious, and easily depressed by failure. 
Roebuck, on the other hand, was a very san- 
guine man and encouraged him to go on. 

It is recorded that as far back as the time 
of the Ancient Britons, swords were forged in 
Birmingham. In 1533 Leland the antiquarian 
found " many smiths in the town that use to 
make knives and all manner of cutting tools . " A 
century later we are told that the place was " full 
of inhabitants and resounding with hammers audi 
anvils." Later still, finer work, buckles, buttons," 
clasps and all sorts of ornamented metal-ware 
were manufactured. Burke spoke of Birming- 
ham as the great toy-shop of Europe. Hutton, 



BOULTON AND WATT 117 

the bookseller and historian of this town, came 
to it in 1740 and he recalls the look of the passing 
workmen. " I had been among dreamers, but 
now I saw men awake. Their very steps shewed 
alacrity." Doubtless this busy hum attracted 
Watt. 

It would appear, however, that he had in any 
case decided to leave his own country to take 
the road which Dr. Johnson called the finest 
in Scotland, the road that leads into England. 
This is no matter for surprise. In one of his 
letters, written just before his departure, we 
read : " There are too many beggars in this 
country, which I am afraid is going to the devil 
altogether. Provisions continue dear and laws 
are made to keep them so." '' Luckily," he 
adds, " the spirit of emigrating rises high and the 
people seem disposed to shew their oppressing 
masters that they can live without them." 

In 1769 we get the first meeting between 
Boulton and Watt when Watt was inspecting 
the Soho works, which were one of the finest 
in Europe. At that time they employed a 
large number of people in making metal articles 
generally, but not engines. 



ii8 JAMES WATT 

Before turning to the latter, it is interesting to 
notice that Boulton was not merely a manufac- 
turer. He loved beauty for its own sake. He saw 
that metal work "is a large field for fancy," and 
resolved, so far as he was concerned, to rid 
Birmingham of all reproach. " The prejudice," 
he writes, "that Birmingham hath so justly 
established against itself makes every fault con- 
spicuous in all articles that have the least pre- 
tensions to taste. How can I expect the public 
to countenance rubbish from Soho while they 
can procure sound and perfect work from any 
other quarter ? " He was thus a precursor in 
the movement that established our School of 
Art and would have resisted, for the sake of 
Birmingham and the future of its manufacture, 
any departure from the highest standards of 
artistic training. 

Boulton was then seeking for something to 
drive his factory. Up to that time it had been 
driven by water power, but that was quite im- 
possible when they had a dry summer, the result 
being that the factory had to be stopped. 
Boulton at first was very reluctant to undertake 
the manufacture of the engine. He was engaged 



WILLIAM MURDOCK 119 

in a large number of concerns, his time and 
capital were fully occupied, and but for the 
fact that in 1774 Roebuck became involved in 
the Carron Ironworks it is very doubtful whether 
Boulton would have joined the firm. When 
Boulton found the amount of money that had 
to be spent he saw difficulties and Watt and 
his concern were taken over as a bad debt. 
The engine was then removed to Soho, where 
it was put up and another attempt was made 
to start it. This was in 1772. 

During this time an interesting figure comes 
on the scene — one of the greatest and in some 
respects most remarkable inventors we have 
had — whose name is little known — William 
Murdock (Scotice : Murdoch). The story of his 
introduction to Boulton will, I think, bear telling. 
Murdock came from Glasgow in order to get work 
at Soho, which was a very famous place. He was 
introduced to Boulton, who told him that he 
wanted no fresh hands at that time. At the 
same time Boulton was looking very carefully at 
a hat which Murdock was rather nervously 
twitching about in his hands, and his 
curiosity was at last so great that he asked 
him what the hat was made of. Murdock 



120 JAMES WATT 

replied " that it was made of timber turned 
on a lathe," and Boulton at once saw that a 
man who could turn a hat to such a shape was no 
ordinary individual. Murdock was taken on and 
remained until the end of his life in 1839 ^^ the 
service of Boulton and Watt. 

Nothing is more remarkable in consider- 
ing the career of Watt than the rapidity with 
which he produced an invention when it was 
wanted for any purpose. Practically every 
feature of the steam engine to-day has either 
been invented or prophesied by Watt. He it 
was who prophesied the application of steam 
to " fire carriages." He saw it would be applied 
to the propulsion of ships. To have forecast the 
expansive working of steam is perfectly wonderful 
when you consider that when he took up the 
subject there was nothing whatever known about 
it. The main slide valve of to-day is one of 
Watt's inventions. The parallel motion is again 
one of Watt's inventions. He invented quite 
a number of other things which people commonly 
think were not invented at all but somehow 
grew. You are all acquainted with the pro- 
cess of copying letters. That was the invention 
of James Watt, and he got it out because he 



CHASEWATER 121 

did not care for the process of writing two letters 
by hand. The copying press was resisted by 
the merchants of the day because they thought 
it would facilitate forgery, and it was with great 
difficulty that Boulton induced them to take it 
up, but by 1800 it had come to be generally used. 

After many difficulties the Watt engine be- 
came a firmly established commercial success. 
In 1778 the Chasewater engine was built 
and put to work. Chasewater was then the 
deepest mine in Cornwall, some sixty-six fathoms 
down. There are some very interesting letters 
from Watt to Boulton, telling how the engine 
was getting on, and he makes the remark that 
the captain of the mine would not have the 
engine throttled down as he appeared to think 
that it was not doing its work unless it made 
a terrible noise. The miners came in from all 
parts of the county to see this wonderful engine 
fork the water from the deepest levels. The 
term " fork " instead of pump was then used, 
but the derivation of the term, like many of those 
in engineering, is not known. 

The economy of the Watt engine over the 
Newcomen was proved, as it used only about 
one-third of the coal. It was then mainly used in 



122 JAMES WATT 

Cornwall, and there were a great variety of con- 
ditions which made it extremely difficult for the 
engine to get its fair chance. Watt and Boulton, 
the adventurers as they were called, were poor 
men, and having formed a company for the 
engines they held out as long as they could, but 
many, many times they were hanging on the 
verge of bankruptcy, and the letters to Boulton 
from Watt for years and years reflected the 
agony of mind of James Watt at the little success 
which the engine had then achieved. He is 
repeatedly saying that the best part of his life 
had gone without any sign of success. It is 
really a most interesting thing to read and recall 
the struggles of the man who is perhaps one of 
the greatest inventors the world has ever seen ; 
and it ought to encourage the younger men to 
think that even then the greatest things were 
not got at once. 

Watt's patent taken out in 1765 would nor- 
mally run out in 1779. Boulton saw, however, 
that unless something was done they would sim- 
ply do all the work and their competitors would 
share with them the profits. The result was 
that after a good deal of opposition an extension 
was secured, and this undoubtedly was the saving 



THE STEAM ENGINE IN BEING 123 

point of Boulton and Watt. In those days, even 
as now, commercial honesty was not perhaps 
quite what it ought to be, and there were a 
number of people who seized on every point 
they could to build other rival engines. We find 
several contemporaries — Horncastle of Bristol 
and Bond the Cornish engineer — repeatedly 
declaring that they had got engines as good as 
Boulton and Watt, with the result that the 
" adventurers " were only able to establish their 
rights after a great deal of litigation. 

The first engine outside their own works was 
built for Wilkinson, an iron founder, to blow 
his bellows. In the next few years several 
engines were erected round about London. 

You must remember that in those days fac- 
tories were practically unknown, and there was 
no great demand for power. Most men worked 
their own small concern and did not require 
an engine of any sort. There were, however, 
some cases in which power was required, the 
most important being the making of flour, which 
up to then had been carried on with water mills. 
In the north of London the number of manu- 
facturers was comparatively small, and all the 
power they wanted was got from water in the 



124 JAMES WATT 

form of water mills. The first engine to demon- 
strate the power of steam for general factory 
purposes was the engine built for the Albion Flour 
Mills in London. This was in 1786. It was 
a complete success in grinding the corn at a 
rate at which no corn had ever been ground 
before. 

In those days people were not particularly 
enlightened, and the report was spread about 
that the engine was taking the bread from the 
workers' mouths. Not long after the mills 
were destroyed by a fire which was set down to 
the malice of the operatives. 

William Murdock very soon rose to a more 
important position in the works of Boulton and 
Watt. He was a remarkably clever mechanic, 
and what seemed in those days a rather difficult 
thing to get, he was steady and trustworthy. I 
should say that the working man of to-day is 
an infinitely better creature than in those days. 

In 1790 Murdock made and constructed a 
small steam engine to work on the road, and this 
was the first mechanically propelled vehicle that 
was ever produced. 

There are a good many stories of the fright 
of the simple-minded Cornish people when they 



BIRMINGHAM INVENTIONS 125 

met Murdock with his fire engine going along 
the road. The times were against the develop- 
ment of mechanically-propelled vehicles. It 
took rather over a hundred years before people 
were convinced that the roads were suitable for 
fire carriages. 

Another of Mur dock's simple inventions was 
coal-gas lighting. It is to Murdock alone to 
whom the whole credit must be given for 
the production of illuminant gas. In 1805 at 
the celebration of the Peace of Amiens the Soho 
Foundry was illuminated by coal gas, and before 
1820 the use of illuminating gas was extended 
to nearly all the large cities. Unfortunately 
for Murdock he did not take out any patents, so 
did not profit by his invention. He also among 
other things invented the transmission of power 
by means of compressed air. It is now in use 
in every part of the world. He drove a little 
engine in the pattern shop by compressed air, 
and showed how the air could be transmitted 
through pipes. 

Boulton was the first to show how copper 
coinage could be produced. He it was who 
reaUy inaugurated the modern system of coin- 
ing, but it took him nearly ten years before he 



126 



JAMES WATT 



could persuade the Government to give him 
the power of making a copper coin. It is 
worthy of note that the French Republican 
Government actually had large quantities made 
for it by Boulton. This coin was withdrawn 
from circulation after the destruction of the 
Republic by Napoleon. 

Another important invention by Boulton 
was a method of producing pictures in colour. 
By some process which has now become quite 
extinct, Boulton made a copy of a picture in 
colours. It has been suspected that it was 
a photographic process, but the probability is 
that it was a simple press process. Some of the 
copies are still in existence. 

In comparison with Watt it is almost inevit- 
able that Boulton should to some extent be over- 
shadowed; yet Boulton's business capacity and 
knowledge of how to manage men certainly 
was a large factor in the success of the 
engine. 

Boulton was the first captain of industry, and 
in his day, one of the most important citizens of 
Birmingham. It is certainly a matter for regret 
that no public memorial of Boulton exists in the 
city which he did so much to advance. 



WATT'S RETIREMENT 127 

In 1800 the partnership between Boulton 
and Watt came to an end. Watt was then 64 
and Boulton was about 72. Watt himself was 
a man, as I have tried to show, who hated 
business but loved mechanical pursuits, and 
he took the earliest opportunity of retiring 
from active business, leaving it to his son, 
James Watt, junior, who carried on the 
firm with the aid of Matthew Robinson 
Boulton — Boulton's son. Watt himself then 
retired to Heathfield Hall, and spent the re- 
mainder of his life apparently much happier in 
working out all kinds of mechanical devices. Be- 
sides being the great father of power production 
he was a versatile man inasmuch as he was a 
great linguist and keenly interested in science. 
At the same time he had all the instincts necessary 
for the practical application of his ideas. Such 
a man as he was had not come before. There 
had been scientific men who had ideas, and there 
had been practical men, but the combination 
was a new one, and in Watt it was realized more 
perfectly than it has ever been since. As Lord 
Brougham observed after his death, Watt was 
a creator. He was a man who went further 
than a mere improver. He was able to origin- 



128 JAMES WATT 

ate things in an extraordinary way. The im- 
provements which have been made in the engine 
since his death are all quite small in comparison 
to the details that he devised. Had he had the 
appliances of to-day there is not the slightest 
doubt that Watt would have done everything 
we are doing now. His successors were mere 
pigmies in comparison with himself. George 
Stephenson and Robert Stephenson, to whom is 
given the credit of the locomotive railway 
engine, only took Watt's schemes and put them 
on four wheels. It was quite a minor arrange- 
ment. But the engine cylinder, the valves, 
the methods of driving, the separate con- 
denser, the governor, remain the same now as 
they were in his day. Yet with all this he 
was so retiring and modest that at the end of 
his life when he was offered a baronetcy he 
declined it, saying he wanted to live out the 
remainder of his life in peace and quietness. 
And we must admire the man who refused such 
an honour. He was above a title of that sort. 
James Watt could afford to remain plain 
James Watt to the end of time; he could have 
no higher title. Murdock remained with the 
younger Watt until about 1830, when he retired 



THE SOHO WORKS 129 

and died in Handsworth after a long and arduous 
life. 

The interesting point to our minds is to notice 
how Boulton, Watt and Murdock between them 
left the mark of cleavage as between the old 
methods of manufacture and those of our own 
day. Before that time there had been no organ- 
ized manufacture of any kind. These three 
men, working together, practically made all 
the modern machine tools, and they were the 
first to collect large numbers of men in one 
organization. At their best the Soho works 
employed nearly one thousand men in various 
operations, a number far greater than had 
ever been engaged together in manufacture 
before. Moreover, they practically origin- 
ated the same methods as are used to-day in 
factory organization, with its managers and 
foremen. All the organization of that kind 
was developed by Boulton, and I think that it 
is only right that occasionally at meetings such 
as this some credit should be given to these 
almost forgotten people. 

The present generation engaged in manufactur- 
ing and engineering has very scanty respect 
for its predecessors, but it is necessary to look 

L.F.M. K 



130 JAMES WATT 

upon the work of those who have gone before 
with some reverence, because they had nothing 
to begin with. They originated and brought 
out of chaos all the means which we find 
available and convenient, and this should be 
brought occasionally to our minds. Above all 
we ought here to be very grateful to them, 
that the world-wide power which has made the 
present civilization possible originated within 
three miles of the centre of Birmingham. 



JOHN BRIGHT 

Born, i6 Nov., 1811 ; first elected Member for Birming- 
ham, 10 Aug., 1857 ; died, 27 March, 1889. 

By C. a. Vince 

Of the nine eminent men whose names are in- 
cluded in this series of lectures, John Bright is 
the only one who at no time was resident in 
Birmingham. His connexion with our city 
began when he was already a person of national 
importance, and the leader of an army of 
politicians scattered over all parts of the United 
Kingdom. He made the acquaintance of 
Birmingham men at a time of life when friend- 
ship rarely ripens into intimacy. His visits were 
not very frequent ; and he never took much 
interest in our local concerns. To the last in 
addressing his constituents he never spoke of 
Birmingham as " our city," but always as 
" your city." Birmingham in fact never sup- 
planted Manchester in his heart, though it was 
the fickleness of Manchester that gave the 
opportunity for the more steadfast affection of 

Birmingham. 

m 



132 JOHN BRIGHT 

Nevertheless, we can easily justify our claim 
to treat Bright as a Birmingham man ; and we 
may hope that the name of our city will be for 
ever associated in history with whatever is 
enduring in his renown. He represented Birm- 
ingham in the House of Commons continuously 
for the last thirty-two years of his long life 
(1857-1889). Our Town Hall was the scene 
of not a few of the great orations that have 
taken their place among the classical achieve- 
ments of English eloquence. The men of 
Birmingham were joined with Bright as pioneers 
in the most arduous enterprise of his life, and 
shared his greatest triumph. He drew from 
the support of our burgesses, given with the 
unchanging loyalty which we claim as a char- 
acteristic virtue, no small part of the strength 
he needed for the struggle which he described 
as a long battle against privilege. The influ- 
ence which he exercised throughout those thirty 
years over the movement of the popular mind 
in the political province can hardly be over- 
estimated ; and we know that, whenever the 
silver trumpet sounded, the most alert and 
whole-hearted response came from the working- 
men of Birmingham. Nor is the force of that 



MEMBER FOR BIRMINGHAM 133 

influence yet exhausted ; though it be undeni- 
able that, in more directions than one, the dis- 
ciples have transgressed the limits of political 
purpose and action laid down by the master. 

If, then, Bright moulded to his will — though 
never wilfully, never for selfish or ambitious 
purposes — the political impulses of Birming- 
ham, can we claim that Birmingham exercised 
any reciprocal influence on Bright' s own career ? 
That is not a question to be answered con- 
fidently. But I think that we can discern that, 
for whatever reason. Bright' s faith in the people 
grew stronger, and the democratic side of his 
purposes more prominent from and after the 
time of his first association with Birmingham. 
In order, however, to make good this point, I 
will now introduce such a brief account of 
Bright' s earlier career as seems necessary for 
our purpose. 

John Bright was born at Rochdale on Novem- 
ber 16, 181 1. Thus he came of age in the 
memorable year 1832 — the year of the first 
Reform Act. Two facts that belong to his 
heredity as well as his personality should con- 
stantly be borne in mind by the student of his 
career : he, and his immediate ancestors, were 



134 JOHN BRIGHT 

Nonconformists — members of the Society of 
Friends — and they were manufacturers. Bright 
was the first Protestant Nonconformist, and one 
of the first of the manufacturing class, to become 
a cabinet minister. His earliest public speeches 
were made in defence of the refusal of Rochdale 
Dissenters to pay church rates ; and it is not 
surprising that throughout his life he was never 
so likely to be betrayed into asperity of language 
as when he had anything to say about the 
privileges of the Established Church. When 
the Anti-Corn-Law League was formed (1839) 
he,- like many other Lancashire men of his class, 
offered his services to the League. In Sep- 
tember, 1841, he dedicated himself to public 
work. He related more than once, in language 
of the most touching pathos, how in that month 
Richard Cobden visited him at Leamington, and 
urged this vocation upon him when he was 
mourning the recent death of his young wife. 
His way was made easy by the public spirit of 
his brothers, who generously liberated him from 
his share in the work of the family business. 
Thenceforward he was the trusty lieutenant, 
and soon the most intimate personal friend, 
of the great leader of the Free Trade movement. 



BRIGHT AND COBDEN 135 

He entered Parliament as member of the city 
of Durham in 1843, and four years later was 
rewarded for his share in the triumph of 1846 
by his election for Manchester, the home of 
the League. 

His eloquence won the attention of the House 
of Commons from the first ; and he gained 
great renown by his popular speeches, delivered 
in every part of England and Scotland. His 
more emotional rhetoric admirably supple- 
mented the vigorous argumentation of Cobden, 
whose speeches are still the best extant model 
of the popular presentation of a chain of reason- 
ing. Cobden made men think as he thought ; 
Bright made them feel as he felt. Nevertheless, 
it was no doubt by a wise discretion that the 
editor of his Speeches included only one of the 
League speeches on Free Trade. There is abun- 
dant testimony that at this time his eloquence 
was already stimulating and effective ; but it 
was only by degrees that it attained the force, 
the dignity, and the matchless felicity of phras- 
ing and rhythm that compelled admiration 
in the maturity of his genius. 

Bright never ceased to look back with satis- 
faction on the part he had taken in establishing 



136 JOHN BRIGHT 

the FreeTrade system ; and many of the speeches 
of his old age were filled with reminiscences of 
that old contention, designed to strengthen the 
faith of his hearers in economical principles 
which he believed to be of lasting and universal 
validity. This is not the place for any discus- 
sion of the principles of the League ; but there 
are two observations that are of some importance 
as bearing on Bright' s later career. 

First, the struggle for the repeal of the Corn 
Law was of the nature of a contention between 
two powerful orders — the landowning aristo- 
cracy, whose influence was still predominant in 
both of the great parties, and the new order 
of wealthy manufacturers, the magnates of 
machinery and the factory system, — the cotton 
spinners, as they were often called, — the whole 
class taking its name from the most conspicuous 
example of wealth rapidly acquired by the new 
mechanical inventions, and the substitution of 
great mills and factories, with their life-blood 
of capital, and their complex organization of 
industry, for the old independent handi- 
crafts. It is difficult for us to realize the bitter- 
ness of this feud. The landowners reproached 
the manufacturers with the miseries of the fac- 



FREE TRADE 137 

tory system, the overcrowding of towns, the 
hard Hfe of the mill-hands, the scanty wages of 
nursing mothers and children of tender years. 
The manufacturers retorted by pictures, equally 
distressing, and equally true to life, of rural 
poverty and dependence. The landowners sus- 
pected the manufacturers of desiring the repeal 
of the Corn Duty, and the ruin of agriculture, 
in order that the labour of the mills might be 
cheaper ; the manufacturers demanded the 
removal of a system, miscalled protection of 
native industry, which protected the rents of 
the squires, but left the labourer unprotected 
against competition. The one imputation may 
seem to be partly justified by the strenuous 
opposition which many Free-traders, notably 
Peel, Bright, Cobden and Villiers, offered to 
legislation for the control of the factory system, 
— e.g. to Fielden's Ten Hours Bill (1846) ; the 
other by such maladroit defences as that of the 
protectionist vvho clinched the argument by 
asking how country gentlemen could provide 
dowries for their daughters if the Corn Laws 
were repealed. 

Bright, at any rate, who then and always 
regarded the doctrines which Cobden learned 



138 JOHN BRIGHT 

from the economists, and expounded with 
matchless skill to Parliament and people, as 
convincing to any ordinary intelligence, believed 
that, in resisting repeal, the landowners were 
sinning against the light, levying tribute on 
industry, and maintaining for selfish purposes 
a system that impoverished the nation. Thus he 
entered politics as a sworn enemy of oligarch- 
ical privilege. By the reciprocation of this 
enmity Bright was held up as an extremist, a 
revolutionary, an overturner of institutions. 
Yet I believe that a candid examination of his 
speeches and letters will reveal him as a man 
whose habit of mind was essentially and fun- 
damentally conservative. No reformer was 
ever less of an idealogue ; none more distrustful 
of violent or disorderly methods. 

While this epoch-making strife was waging 
between the old aristocracy and the middle 
class, the class of wage-earners was divided 
or indifferent. Artisans interested in politics 
for the most part went with the Chartists, who 
were not friendly to the League. A significant 
incident in Bright' s early career was a debate 
at Northampton (1844) between him and the 
leader of the Chartists, Feargus O'Connor, 



BRIGHT AS ECONOMIST 139 

who supported the Corn Law. Thus, although 
Bright dehghted in large popular audiences, 
there was nothing in the work of the League 
to make him what he became later as member 
for Birmingham, the leader of a movement 
for the admission of artisans to full citizenship. 
Secondly, the victory of the Anti-Corn-Law 
League was also a victory of Economists, of 
men disposed to measure national prosperity 
in terms of money earned and saved, zealous 
for the national wealth, and for a scientific 
theory of the national wealth. It was natural 
that such men should be economists in another 
sense, complaining of the waste of the resources 
of the nation by taxation larger than was 
necessary for the legitimate needs of the State. 
Here Bright worked with Hume and Moles- 
worth, the spokesmen of the Philosophical 
Radicals in this matter. Many of you may 
remember that, when rooms were decorated 
in his honour, one of the mottoes was always 
" A Free Breakfast Table " ; he wished the 
State to dispense with all taxation on common 
articles of food. Nay more, he went so far 
as to assent to the policy of a Financial Reform 
Association, which desired to abolish all indirect 



140 JOHN BRIGHT 

taxation, and would have given us not only 
free (i.e. untaxed) food, but also free beer 
and free tobacco. 

This — the cry for retrenchment — is the 
connecting link between the first and the second 
of Bright' s enterprises. The results of the 
Reform of 1832 had disappointed the Economists. 
The middle-class Parliament had indeed abolished 
the corn duties, accepted the principle of Free 
Trade, reformed the Poor Law, and rendered 
other services to sound economics ; but it 
had failed to curb the rapacity of the Exchequer. 
In 1849, when the Economists put their protest 
on record, they were able to complain that the 
national expenditure had increased by nearly 
£10,000,000 in fourteen years, and had reached 
the alarming amount of £54,000,000. Bright 
conceived the hope that a new reform of the 
Parlimentary system would produce a House 
of Commons better disposed to check national 
extravagance. To this proposal Cobden assented 
with some reluctance — for his faith in the 
middle-class regime was less easily shaken 
than that of Bright. 

Bright' s advocacy of a new measure of Parlia- 
mentary reform began as early as 1848 ; but 



FIRST SPEECH IN BIRMINGHAM 141 

the popular movement of which he was the 
leader may be said to have been initiated by 
the first speech that he made to his new con- 
stituents — almost exactly fifty years ago (Octo- 
ber 27, 1858). As I mention that speech I 
cannot but recall vivid descriptions of its 
extraordinary effect which I heard from 
the lips of two Birmingham politicians who 
have since followed Bright into the eternal 
silence — Mr. Powell Williams and Mr. Bunce. 
Mr. Bunce was at that time editor of a Tory 
newspaper here. When he heard Bright his 
conscience began to trouble him ; he found 
conviction of sin ; he resigned his occupation, 
and Birmingham might have lost one of its most 
useful citizens but for a fortunate vacancy in 
the editorship of the Daily Post. Remember 
that the part taken by Birmingham in the 
agitation for Free Trade had been inconsider- 
able, but that in the earlier struggle for Parlia- 
mentary reform our city had led the country. 
Many of the veterans of that conflict, the men 
who, as Bright phrased it, had " shaken the 
fabric of privilege to its base," survived to 
welcome the new leader to Birmingham ; and 
in their presence, appealing to their white 



142 JOHN BRIGHT 

hairs, he called on their sons to join him in a 
new campaign against the old enemy. 

But here an inevitable question compels 
another digression. How did it come to pass 
that the Lancashire statesman, the friend of 
Richard Cobden, Alderman of Manchester, the 
champion of the cotton spinners, came to 
Birmingham at all ? The cause of Bright's rejec- 
tion by the Liberals of Manchester was, in 
general, his persistent antagonism to Palmerston 
— one of the two Whig aristocrats who com- 
peted for the lead of the Liberal party, and 
at that time the only man competent to form 
a Liberal administration ; and, in particular, 
his vehement opposition to the policy that had 
involved the country in the Crimean War. Bright 
and Palmerston were in character and disposi- 
tion most strongly antipathetic ; and so long 
as Palmerston was a Liberal leader. Bright 
found it impossible to be a loyal member of 
the party. Bright always held and expressed 
the strongest aversion to a policy of fidgety 
interference in European affairs, and cherished 
a special hatred for a phrase that was then 
often on the lips of statesmen — the " balance 
of power " — which seemed to him to serve as a 



I 



BRIGHT AND PALMERSTON 143 

pretext for a great deal of perilous and provoc- 
ative intermeddling. Such intermeddling, in 
Bright' s view, had often endangered peace ; 
and now it had at last brought its natural 
consequence in an international embroilment, 
and a war waged at the other end of Europe for 
the sake of a quarrel in which the interest of 
this country was remote, if not iUusory. 
It cannot be stated too distinctly that neither 
in 1854, nor at any other crisis, did Bright, as 
a politician, lay down the principle of peace 
at any price. His maxim was : No interfer- 
ence with other nations, except where British 
interests were directly involved. Time does 
not permit me to discuss the question whether 
or not Bright was justified in the view that war 
might have been averted without dishonour ; 
but I do not think any one can read Bright' s 
speeches, and compare them with Kinglake's 
narrative of the diplomatic proceedings, without 
admitting that Bright successfully convicted 
Lord Aberdeen's Government of some grave 
errors, of vacillation and inconsistency, of 
slovenly definition of their purposes, and of 
weakness in letting themselves be twisted out 
of the straight path by the obstinacy of 



144 JOHN BRIGHT 

their ambassador, and the cunning of their 
disreputable ally. We now know from Greville's 
Diary that Bright' s view of the diplomatic 
blunders was shared to the full by a competent, 
well-informed, and unbiassed observer. 

The five Crimean speeches — four of which 
are to be found in Thorold Rogers's edition 
— are in my judgment the finest flower of Bright' s 
incomparable eloquence — forcible in argument, 
measured in denunciation, and glowing with 
an emotion that is generous, humane, and most 
assuredly patriotic. Note also, as a proof of 
his courage and candour, that the Government 
that made the war, the Government that 
he denounced as an " incapable and guilty 
administration," was the first Government 
formed on a Free-trade basis, being composed 
of a coalition of Liberals with Conservatives, 
like Lord Aberdeen and Mr. Gladstone, who 
had separated from their own party for the 
sake of Free Trade. 

If these speeches won immortal renown 
for Bright' s eloquence, they imperilled his 
popularity, and exposed him to cruel opprob- 
rium. How bitter was the resentment he 
provoked you may judge from three well- 



THE CRIMEAN WAR 145 

known lines in Tennyson's poem " Maud." 
This fragment of satire was universally believed 
to have been aimed at Bright until we were 
informed in Tennyson's biography that the 
poet himself disowned the application. The 
internal evidence, however, appears to me 
to be decisive ; and I prefer to believe that 
the poet's memory misled him when his wrath 
had subsided. The hero of the poem, a glorifier 
of the war policy, goes to a peace meeting and 
listens with much disgust to a speaker whom 
he describes as — 

The broad-brimmed hawker of holy things, 
Whose ear is stuffed with his cotton, and rings 
Even in dreams to the chink of his pence. 

Remembering that the only two politicians of 
the first rank who protested against the war 
were Cobden and Bright, observe, first, that 
the person here satirized was a Quaker — 
" broad-brimmed." For many years both be- 
fore and after this time. Bright, and no other 
public man except Bright, was always repre- 
sented in Punch as wearing a broad-brimmed 
hat, though in fact he did not advertise his 
opinions by means of his head-gear, but wore 

L.F.M. L 



146 JOHN BRIGHT 

hats of any shape that was in common use. 
Secondly, he was a cotton-spinner — " his cot- 
ton " ; and " his ears were stuffed with his 
cotton," that is, his interest in the cotton trade 
made him deaf to the voice of patriotism. 
Thirdly, he was a "hawker of holy things"; 
a phrase which the future annotator of Tenny- 
son will have no difficulty in explaining by 
reference to Bright' s characteristic habit of 
appealing to the moral law, and especially 
of citing the words of Holy Scripture in 
political speeches. That habit exposed him 
to malevolent imputations ; but in a thoroughly 
genuine character there was nothing more 
genuine than the simplicity of his piety. It 
may have been a Puritan, but it was not a 
Puritanical, habit ; what Bright inherited was 
the earnestness of the real Puritans, not the 
hypocrisy of the sham Puritans. Our com- 
mentator may also remind the reader how 
Palmerston had recently insulted Bright by 
calling him "the hon. and rev. gentleman." 
Fourthly, *' his ears rang even in dreams to the 
chink of his pence." No accusation was more 
constantly brought against Bright than that his 
zeal for national thrift made him negligent of 



DEMOCRACY FOR ITS OWN SAKE 147 

national honour ; that he judged policies 
by asking which was the cheapest. 

With such a view of Bright' s pohtical char- 
acter prevalent even in his own class and within 
his own party, we may claim the virtue of 
magnanimity for the Birmingham which elected 
him without a contest so soon after his rejection 
by Manchester. I have said that Bright's 
democratic sympathies developed rapidly from 
the time of his association with the men of 
Birmingham ; no doubt the war, and the 
odium he incurred by opposing the war, 
strengthened his distrust of middle-class govern- 
ment, and his determination to look for sym- 
pathy to the unenfranchised thousands who 
were knocking at the door of the constitution. 
He no longer demanded reform chiefly for 
the sake of retrenchment, but as one desiring 
democracy for its own sake. In his earlier 
speeches he had laid most stress on such a redis- 
tribution as should give more power to the in- 
dustrial towns, and less to rural districts ; now 
his chief purpose was to strengthen the State by 
the enrolment of an army of competent citizens. 
To treat the settlement of 1832 as final was, he 
said, '' to erect the middle class into a sort of 



148 JOHN BRIGHT 

oligarchy." " The class which has hitherto 
ruled in this country has failed miserably. If a 
class has failed, let us try the nation. That is 
our faith, that is our purpose, that is our cry : 
Let us try the nation ! " 

Neither of the two parties professed hostility 
to Reform ; neither seemed to be in earnest 
about Reform. The Liberal Government in 
1852, the Coalition Government in 1854, the 
Conservative Government in 1859, ^^'^^ ^^^ 
Liberal Government in i860, all brought in 
Reform Bills, and then dropped them. Finally, 
the Liberal Bill of 1866, which was really meant 
to pass, was defeated by the AduUamite seces- 
sion, and the opportunity passed to Disraeli. 
All this time a popular party was forming that 
demanded the new enfranchisement with a 
resolution that grew in intensity ; and of that 
party Bright was the acknowledged leader. 
Never was there a more peaceable agitation ; 
never such astonishing success in arousing 
popular enthusiasm to the highest degree of 
fervour, yet restraining it within the limits of 
good order. The Reform Bill of 1867 was in 
truth the crowning triumph of Bright' s career. 
The Bill was Disraeh's Bill, as the Bill that 



THE VICTORY OF REFORM 149 

repealed the Corn Law had been Peel's Bill ; but 
just as Peel in 1846 insisted on handing the 
laurel wreath on to Cobden, so with equal pro- 
priety Disraeli might have hailed Bright as the 
real victor of the long battle for reform. Both 
the two parties had been aristocratic coteries ; 
Bright had democratized the Liberal party by 
sustained effort, and Disraeli had democratized 
the Conservative party by a single stroke of 
genius — unless indeed you prefer to attribute 
both achievements to the unseen and impersonal 
forces of progress. 

The view of Bright' s career which I desire to 
submit to your consideration is this. He is 
a figure of first-rate importance in the political 
history of the Victorian Era, because, both 
before and after 1867, he was the chief political 
educator of the men who in that year were called 
to the full duties of citizenship. The appre- 
hensions with which men, who were neither 
foolish nor ill-instructed, looked forward to 
the results of the leap in the dark, may be 
read in the speeches of Lowe and Salisbury, 
the leaders of the recalcitrant Liberals and 
the recalcitrant Conservatives, or, more con- 
veniently, in Carlyle's furious pamphlet, " Shoot- 



150 JOHN BRIGHT 

ing Niagara." None of you, I hope, will assent 
to Carlyle's view that the achievement of '' John 
of Bromwicham " had been " the calling in 
of new supplies of blockheadism, gullibility, 
bribeability, and amenability to beer and 
balderdash " ; but on the other hand, perhaps 
none of you will deny that there must always 
be grave perils in any new democratic experi- 
ment. I beg you to reflect how much more dis- 
tasteful the immediate results of reform might 
have been to those who desire an orderly, secure, 
and measured progress, if the hero of trium- 
phant democracy forty years ago had not been 
a man of moderate aims, of equable temper, 
void of personal ambition, and singularly immune 
from the temptations that beset a successful 
demagogue. 

The victory of 1867 made a great change in 
Bright's career. He had hated Palmerston, 
and he had not loved Russell ; but at last he 
had found a leader whom he could follow 
without misgiving, and thenceforward until 
the catastrophe of 1886, he was content to serve 
his country as a loyal member of the Liberal 
party. He became a Minister of the Crown 
with much reluctance, and would have declined 



BRIGHT AS ADMINISTRATOR 151 

office but for the urgent remonstrances of his 
friends. He exposed himself to some reproach 
by refusing the office of Secretary for India, 
for he had been an unsparing critic of the faults 
of the British administration of India. But 
in truth he was not well qualified for any office 
that required diligent attention to details of 
business. He was constitutionally indolent, 
and a hard worker only under the stimulus of a 
strong sense of duty ; and he had already been 
warned by illness that mental exertion was 
perilous to him. We have the testimony of 
his colleagues to the value of his counsels in the 
deliberations of the Cabinets ; but as an admin- 
istrator he gained no new distinction. One 
important legislative achievement is put to 
his credit. He had been the earliest and most 
persistent advocate of state-aided land purchase 
by tenants as a remedy for Irish agrarian 
troubles. The clauses in the Irish Church Act 
and the Irish Land Act by which this experi- 
ment, since so largely developed, was initiated, 
are known as the Bright Clauses. 

In other ways, no doubt, Bright contributed 
to the successes of the first and second Gladstone 
administrations ; but — let me repeat it — it is 



152 JOHN BRIGHT 

as a political educator that he has a place in 
history. He brought to that task an over- 
mastering earnestness of purpose, unsuspected 
integrity and candour, generous sympathy, 
an untroubled faith in the doctrines of the 
Philosophical Radicals, and that luminous and 
persuasive eloquence that entitles him to the 
first place among the orators of his century. 
The words of his speeches are on record ; and 
many of you can recall the dignity of his manner, 
the melody of his voice, the refinement of his 
noble features, the restraint of his gestures. 
Those who never saw him may read something 
of his manner and character in the fine portrait 
that adorns our Art Gallery ; or they may try 
to imagine a man as different as it is possible 
to conceive from the coarse-featured, bawling, 
gesticulating demagogue of the Punch cartoons. 
The most important part of Bright' s political 
teaching may be summarized under four heads : 
Democracy, or trust in the people ; Religious 
Equality ; Peace, or non-interference abroad ; 
Laisser-faire, or non-interference at home. Of 
his services to democracy I have said all I 
wish to say. As for Religious Equality it is 
sufficient to remind you that he witnessed and 



NON-INTERVENTION 153 

helped to forward four important enactments 
based on this principle, viz., the abolition of 
Church rates, the admission of Jews to Parlia- 
ment, the abrogation of religious tests at the 
ancient Universities, and the Act which estab- 
lished the rights of Nonconformists in parish 
churchyards. He lent his eloquence to the 
service of the Liberation Society ; and his only 
disagreement with Cobden, who was a Church- 
man, was when he opposed, and Cobden sup- 
ported, the increase of the Maynooth Grant. 
To what has been said about his protest 
against the war with Russia, it has to be added 
that in 1883 he resigned office immediately 
after the bombardment of Alexandria ; and 
that he was always on the alert to raise his 
voice against any adventurous policy that 
reminded him of the bad days of Palmerston. 
He would not tolerate any intervention that 
might possibly lead to bloodshed, even when 
it was represented that humanity required 
British aid for the oppressed ; Britain, he 
protested, had no vocation to be " the knight 
errant of the human race." It is true that he 
once said " Perish Savoy " ; it is not true that 
he ever said " Perish India." I will not venture 



154 JOHN BRIGHT 

to estimate to what degree he succeeded in 
indoctrinating the democratic mind with his 
principle of non-intervention ; but it may at 
least be said that the people will never allow 
Great Britain to go to war without some stronger 
reason than was considered sufficient in 1854. 
It is when we contemplate Bright' s ardent 
devotion to the old Radical doctrine of laisser- 
faire that we realize how far we have drifted 
from his moorings. He was by no means 
content with the application of this doctrine 
to the fiscal or commercial system. " Most 
of our evils," he declared, " arise from legislative 
interference." He opposed the Ten Hours Act 
as illegitimate interference with freedom of 
contract, although his friend Mill had distinctly 
excepted the regulation of hours of labour from 
the general doctrine. When further factory 
legislation was proposed he said he would prefer 
to " leave the country and go somewhere else 
where capital and labour were allowed to fight 
their own battle on their own ground without 
legislative interference." He resented the ex- 
tension of the Truck Act. He objected to 
compulsory vaccination, not because it was 
vaccination, but because it was compulsory ; 



LAISSER-FAIRE 155 

and he did not like compulsory education. He 
was for many years one of the advocates of a 
voluntary system of education, i.e. a system 
under which schools should be neither controlled 
nor supported by the State or the municipalities. 
This opinion he changed ; but it is probable 
that he was saved from a disagreement with 
his Birmingham friends by the illness that 
secluded him from public work in 1870. He 
warned the Trade Unions that it was impos- 
sible to keep up wages by combination. He was a 
friend of temperance, but refused support to 
temperance legislation. The officials of the 
Board of Trade told Mr. Chamberlain that, 
when Bright was President, he rarely interfered 
with their discretion, and when he did do so it 
was always to countermand, never to direct, the 
exercise of the powers of the Department. 

It is impossible to avoid burning questions 
in dealing with the career of a man whose 
work consisted of the enunciation of very empha- 
tic opinions on topics of which many are still con- 
troversial. Bright' s confident assertion of his 
judgments exposed him to the charge of being 
intolerant and dogmatic ; but looked at from 
the other side this characteristic will appear 



156 JOHN BRIGHT 

to be the virtue of a man too honest for com- 
promise and caring more for principles than 
for tactics. Observe also that no man more 
often enjoyed the satisfaction of seeing propos- 
als which he had supported as one of a small 
minority adopted by general consent. Such 
an experience tends to fortify self-confidence. 
Yet it seems safe to conjecture that, even in 
an audience so diversified as this, there is no man 
or woman who does not dissent from some of 
the opinions which Bright advanced in his 
uncompromising way. Such indeed must be 
the posthumous fate of all political teachers, 
when the eternal truths of one generation have 
become the discarded errors of the next. Bright 
had a great multitude of admiring disciples ; 
but the successful educator is not the man whose 
pupils turn his sayings into articles of faith, 
but he who has inspired them with the spirit 
of honest inquiry and independent judgment. 
Bright was the preacher of a political creed, 
but he was also the apostle of a political religion, 
— and religions live longer than creeds. He 
taught the men of Birmingham to treat politics, 
the art and science of national well-being, as a 
study worthy of the most earnest attention ; 



A POLITICAL RELIGION 157 

he never spoke without hfting them above the 
pettiness and flippancy of daily poHtical conten- 
tion ; and he never allowed them to forget one 
central doctrine, which really is an eternal 
verity, though all the maxims, and watchwords 
of all the parties should perish, that the moral 
law was enacted for states and empires as well 
as for men and citizens, and that even in politics 
the path of righteousness is the way of salvation . 



BISHOP WESTCOTT 

Born in Birmingham, 1825. Died, 1901. 

By J. H. B. Masterman 

There are two kinds of citizens that a city 
like ours ought to dehght to honour. There 
are the citizens who, often coming into the city 
from outside, have spent their hves in its ser- 
vice ; and there are the citizens who, equipped 
here, have gone out into the world and played 
their part in shaping the life of the nation. 

Bishop Westcott belongs to the second class. 
After he left school his connexion with Birming- 
ham virtually ended, though he never ceased 
to think with gratitude of the early lessons 
learnt here. 

King Edward's School, Birmingham, gave 
to the Church of England three of her greatest 
leaders in the last generation. And these 
three leaders represent in a very interesting way 
the many-sidedness of Church life. Light- 
foot's special province was the past. His vast 
range of historical knowledge threw light on 
much that was obscure in the early history of 



i6o BISHOP WESTCOTT 

the Christian society. Benson's special pro- 
vince was the present, his great desire was to 
make the English Church an effective instru- 
ment for meeting the actual needs of to-day. 
But Westcott's special province was the future. 
There was something of the prophet's vision 
always in those keen eyes of his. In a very 
real sense he watched all his life long for the 
coming of Christ. 

The outer facts of Westcott's life can be 
soon told. He was born in Birmingham in 
1825. His father, a man of retiring habits, 
was a keen botanist, and was for some years 
lecturer on Botany at the Sydenham College 
Medical School — the precursor of Queen's Col- 
lege, and therefore of the Medical Faculty of 
this University. From him the Bishop inherited 
his great love for flowers. In due course young 
Westcott proceeded to King Edward's School, 
then under Dr. Prince Lee. There he won the 
respect of his schoolfellows by his intellectual 
ability and — perhaps even more — by his high 
moral character. From early life Westcott's 
religious instincts were strong. One of his school 
friends notices his habit of talking about " points 
of theology, problems of morality and the ethics 



CAMBRIDGE i6i 

of politics." But though studious and thought- 
ful beyond his years, young Westcott was not 
a prig. 

The period of Westcott' s childhood was one 
of political ferment in Birmingham. Among 
his earliest recollections was one of Thomas 
Attwood leading a great procession of men to a 
Political Union meeting in 183 1. A few years 
later Chartism led to serious disturbances in 
the city and Westcott referred long afterwards 
to the deep impression made on him by the 
experiences of that time. 

From the school he passed to Cambridge, 
where he won many academic honours. 
After taking his degree he stayed up for some 
years, and among the pupils with whom he read 
during this time were two old King Edward School 
boys of a younger generation, with whom he kept 
up a lifelong friendship — Joseph Barber Light- 
foot, afterwards the great scholar and Bishop 
of Durham, and Edward White Benson, after- 
wards Archbishop of Canterbury. Another of 
his pupils was F. J. A. Hort, who was destined 
to be his colleague in one of his greatest tasks — 
the revision of the text of the Greek New Testa- 
ment. A few words may be said here about 

L.F.M. M 



i62 BISHOP WESTCOTT 

Westcott as a teacher. All his teaching work 
was marked by two special characteristics. 
The first of these was his intense enthusiasm 
for his subject — an enthusiasm comprehensive 
enough to include Greek particles and social 
reforms. It was noble, yet also pathetic, to 
hear Dr. Westcott trying to awaken in a class- 
room of undergraduates the same enthusiasm 
that he felt for the subtler meaning of some 
Greek construction or the views of some 
unfamiliar Christian Father. The best men 
responded to the stimulus of such teaching, and 
even the more unresponsive carried away the 
startling impression that it was possible for a 
man to feel the same intense interest in matters 
of scholarship that we most of us bestow on 
other, and perhaps less worthy objects. The 
other characteristic of Dr. Westcott's teaching 
was its thoroughness. It would almost be 
true to say that he and Lightfoot introduced 
a new standard of thoroughness into English 
theological work. While rivalling the great 
German scholars of the time in minuteness of 
research, they brought to the task of the com- 
mentator a breadth of view that we often miss 
in German theological work. A remark once 



LITERARY WORK 163 

made about Lightfoot would be equally true of 
Westcott — where he has reaped, little is left for 
the gleaners. 

A remarkable example of the patient labour 
of the true scholar is afforded by the so-called 
Cambridge Text of the Greek New Testament. 
In 1853 Westcott and his friend Hort decided 
to prepare a revised text of the New Testament. 
Twenty-eight years passed before the now fa- 
mous volumes that announced the completion 
of their task saw the light. During these years 
every variant reading had been subjected to a 
detailed investigation such as had probably 
never before been given to it, and whatever may 
be the ultimate verdict of criticism on Westcott 
and Hort's text, it will remain one of the finest 
products of English scholarship of the last 
century. 

In 1852, being anxious to marry a lady whom 
he had known from early boyhood, he accepted 
a mastership at Harrow, where he stayed for 
nearly eighteen years. His work at the school 
left him leisure for theological writing, and 
during these years he produced a number of 
theological works of first-rate importance. 
At a time when many Churchmen still regarded 



i64 BISHOP WESTCOTT 

historical criticism and modern science with 
distrust, Westcott was prepared to accept 
both. He believed that the remedy for rash 
conclusions lay not in obscurantism but in 
long and patient investigation. 

In historical criticism it is specially important 
to realize that the most startling and revolu- 
tionary opinion is not necessarily the truest. At 
the time when Westcott' s earlier books were 
written, the accepted conclusions as to date and 
authorship of the books of the New Testament 
were being challenged with great confidence. 
He lived to see a large body of the most com- 
petent scholars returning to the more conserva- 
tive views that he had defended. 

No account of Westcott' s life at Harrow would 
be complete without some reference to a scheme 
that at one time greatly attracted him. He 
abhorred the growing luxury of modern life, 
and desired to see a simpler standard of living. 
But he felt that this simpler standard must be 
exhibited in family and not merely in individual 
life. So he suggested what he called a '* Coeno- 
bium," a kind of College of families living a 
common life under simple rules of work, devo- 
tion and expenditure. 



RETURN TO CAMBRIDGE 165 

The old monastic rule of poverty, chastity 
and obedience was to take the form of a pledge 
of poverty, study and devotion. He wrote an 
article on the subject in the Contemporary 
Review, and corresponded about it with his 
friends. He was, as his son says, " very much 
in earnest " about it, but, like Coleridge's 
Pantocracy and many other similar schemes, it 
never reached the stage of practical experiment. 

In 1869 Westcott accepted a Canonry at Peter- 
borough under Bishop Magee ; and it is an 
interesting comment on the current ideas of fat 
livings and comfortable Canonries that it was 
only by banishing meat from the family 
breakfast-table that the future Bishop managed 
to live within his income. After a time, largely 
through the influence of Lightfoot, he was 
elected to the Regius Professorship of Theology 
in the University of Cambridge, and returned 
there to do much important service in the 
organization of the theological work of the 
University. For a time he held this office in 
conjunction with a Canonry at Westminster, 
and then, in 1890, he was called, at the age 
of 65, to succeed his old pupil and friend, 
Lightfoot, as Bishop of Durham. 



i66 BISHOP WESTCOTT 

It was during his eleven years at Durham 
that the Bishop's deep interest in social and 
labour problems became known to the public, 
though his friends and pupils knew that for 
many years he had thought deeply about these 
things. The most striking event of these years 
was his successful intervention in the great 
Coal Strike. I need not tell the story in de- 
tail, but it illustrates the kind of service that 
an impartial and sympathetic outsider can 
render in trade disputes. The Coal Strike had 
lasted about three months, and directly affected 
over 80,000 workers. Unwillingness on both 
sides to " give in " prevented any settlement, 
though the North of England was suffering 
acute distress. What was wanted was the 
intervention of some wise counsellor, whom 
both parties could trust, to smooth the friction 
that made negotiations difficult. Here was 
the Bishop's opportunity. He had won the 
confidence of the Durham miners, and his char- 
acter and position secured for him the respect 
of the employers. At the Conference that met 
at Bishop Auckland, under his chairmanship, 
he laid down the principle, the recognition of 
which alone, in his opinion, could secure last- 



THE COAL STRIKE 167 

iiig peace — the principle that the true relation 
of capital and labour was not hostility but 
fellowship. After much discussion, the workers' 
representatives agreed to a reduction of 10 per 
cent, and the establishment of a Conciliation 
Board to avert future discord. 

Will you bear with me if I say just a word 
about the lesson that seems to me to be taught 
by this incident ? Many Churchmen believe — 
as Bishop Westcott certainly did — that the 
present industrial system, by which the worker 
is divorced from any effective responsibility 
for the organization of the industry to which 
he contributes the only capital he has — his own 
life — cannot be regarded as a satisfactory or 
permanent solution of the industrial problem. 
But though it is the duty of the Church to 
bear witness, in season and out of season, to 
those principles of brotherhood and social 
justice out of which alone any better solution 
can come, any attempt to identify the Church 
with particular schemes of reconstruction, and 
to make the Christian society an instrument of 
industrial revolution, can only mean the loss 
of priceless opportunities of effective social 
service. The future must grow out of the 



i68 BISHOP WESTCOTT 

present, not by embittered contest and the 
upheaval of the foundations of society, but 
by the awakening power of ideal sthat make 
selfishness manifestly ignoble and idleness and 
luxury disgraceful. Prince Lee's last words to 
his old pupil — " Be not afraid, only believe " — 
may seem tame as a watchword of social 
progress. But courage and faith constitute 
a mightier agent of social regeneration than we 
have yet learned to recognize. 

I cannot spend much time in speaking of 
Bishop Westcott's lifelong work as a theological 
teacher. Every student of the Bible is his 
debtor for years of strenuous labour on the 
text of the New Testament, and for his com- 
mentaries on the writings of St. John and the 
Epistle to the Hebrews. But the distinctive 
feature of Westcott's teaching was his effort 
to keep theology in touch with life. I began 
my career at Cambridge just after he had left 
for Durham, and I found his influence still 
potent among the younger men who had grown 
up under the inspiration of his guidance. The 
ideal he had impressed on us all might be 
summed up in the one word " Service." The 
true measure of life's wealth was not in what 



CITIZENSHIP 169 

it gets but in what it gives. " Shall I stay in 
Cambridge as a don or go abroad as a mis- 
sionary ? " ** Shall I become a schoolmaster 
or a curate in a slum parish ? " To all such 
questions he taught us to apply the one test — 
the test of service. 

And this idea of service was not narrowly 
restricted within ecclesiastical hedgerows. All 
civic life spoke to him of the same ideal. In 
a sermon at the Birmingham Church Con- 
gress in 1893, on " Citizenship, Human and 
Divine," he referred to the great public build- 
ings of our city that had grown up here since 
the days of his boyhood : 

Every great building which represents the social 
life of the city — a city, alas, still without a Cathedral — 
schools, libraries, art galleries, halls, council chambers, 
courts of justice, have arisen since then. Taken together, 
this splendid array of municipal institutions is an impres- 
sive witness to the fulness of life. Each one ought to be, 
each one may be, a sanctuary in which fellow-citizens 
of the saints meet to prepare for their work and to fulfil 
it. Each one — whatever occasions may seem to have 
been lost — is still a sign and a call to men who are citizens 
of heaven and earth. 

Westcott had no sympathy for the man whose 
religion did not rouse in him the sense of civic 
duty. He felt that the great social evils of 



170 BISHOP WESTCOTT 

our time were a trumpet-call to the Christian 
Society. Speaking in Hartlepool about the 
problem of overcrowding he said : 

The facts as to overcrowding and the consequences 
of the facts, are not always in evidence, and we have dull 
imaginations. I plead then in the name of our Faith, 
I plead on behalf of those who by God's will are "joint-heirs 
with us of the grace of life " that in every urban and rural 
council some from amongst us should learn the facts as 
to overcrowding and make them known. The evils will 
then be met. The awakened Christian conscience will 
find no rest till the remediable causes of moral infection 
are removed. To corrupt the development of life is not 
less criminal than to maim the body. We are guUty of 
conniving at the defilement of temples of God till we faco 
the problem according to our opportunities and strive te 
solve it. 

But all social service needs knowledge as 
well as zeal, and it was the realization of this 
truth that led Bishop Westcott to take a lead- 
ing share in the establishment of the Christian 
Social Union, of which he was the first Presi- 
dent^an office in which he has been succeeded 
by our own Bishop of Birmingham. For the 
object of the Christian Social Union is not to 
issue manifestos or organize movements, but 
to gather Churchmen together for the careful 
study of actual facts. It exists to persuade 
clergymen to read bluebooks, and district 



UNIVERSITY EXTENSION 171 

visitors to study Acts of Parliament, and church- 
wardens to explore slums. It seeks to educate 
the conscience of the Christian Society. And 
no one who is in touch with the Church life 
of to-day can fail to recognize the awakening 
of the English Church to a new consciousness 
of her social mission. 

Few movements awakened a stronger sym- 
pathy in Westcott than the University Exten- 
sion movement. He cared for it because he 
saw in it the beginning of a new bond of sym- 
pathy between the University and the larger 
world outside. In a Conference at Cambridge 
twenty years ago he drew a glowing picture of 
the time when " miners in Northumbrian coal- 
fields, artisans in Midland factories, toilers in 
the country and in the cities, will repeat with 
glad pride what is not our motto only but their 
motto also, when they find their lives enlightened 
and purified, I will venture to say ennobled and 
hallowed, by the conception of higher education 
which it has been the privilege of this University 
to bring home to them." 

Had he been alive to-day, and able to revisit 
his native place, I am sure that two things would 
have specially rejoiced his heart — the fulfil- 



172 BISHOP WESTCOTT 

merit of his cherished hopes in the establish- 
ment of a bishopric of Birmingham (and, may 
I add, the appointment of his old Harrow pupil, 
Dr. Gore, as the first bishop), and the establish- 
ment of our University as a centre for the 
educational life of the Midlands. 

What he would have said to us is, I think, 
indicated by some words of his at a meeting of 
the London University Extension Society in 
1888 :— 

" Special training is not the work of a Univer- 
sity, and, if I may speak my whole mind, I 
confess that I am alarmed and ashamed when 
I hear the results of science treated as instru- 
ments for successful competition ; when I hear 
the language, the methods, the aims of war 
transferred to the conditions of commerce and 
the circumstances of daily life. No University 
will lend itself to the pursuit of such an end. 
Universities exist to maintain and propagate a 
nobler faith. So far as we have entered into 
their spirit, we believe, and we strive to spread 
the belief, that life is as the man is ; that if a 
man is sordid, selfish, narrow, mean, his life, 
however affluent, will reflect his character ; 
and, on the other hand, that there is about us 



UNIVERSITY IDEALS 173 

an inexhaustible store of unrealized possibilities, 
a treasure of spiritual wealth, open to the poor- 
est, which grows with the using if only we know 
how to use it. And we believe that true edu- 
cation opens the eyes of the soul ; that it is a 
strength in the difficulties which we must face ; 
a solace in the sorrows that we must bear ; an 
inspiration in interpreting the new truths which 
claim to receive from us a harmonious place 
beside the old ; that it offers to all a vision of a 
larger order truly human and truly divine ; 
that it is, in the noble words of your motto, * not 
a means of livelihood, but a means of life.* " 

But how came it that this rather shy and 
retiring Christian scholar, protected by the 
circumstances of his life from contact with the 
squalid realities of modern industrialism, be- 
came one of the great inspiring influences in 
the " socializing " of Christian thought ? The 
answer to that question brings us back to the 
region of theology. Under the influence of the 
great Augustine, Latin theology has dominated 
Western thought for centuries. And Latin 
theology starts from the fact of sin. Born 
in a world dying of its own corruption, it 
cries for revolution in the individual and in 



174 BISHOP WESTCOTT 

society. It stands armed before the world 
that has crucified its Master. It calls men to 
flee from the wrath to come. 

Now in all this there is truth, but it is not the 
whole truth. Bishop Westcott, like Frederick 
Denison Maurice, was a disciple of the Greek 
Fathers — Clement, Origen, Athanasius. And 
the Greek Fathers begin not with sin but 
with God and the Incarnation. They see 
human life as Divine before they turn to 
see it defiled and degraded. And therefore 
the redemption of man means to them the 
restoration of human life to its true condition 
— the will of God done on earth as it is in Heaven. 
Greek theology is the theology of evolution — of 
a Divine purpose working in human society 
for the restoration of the lost ideals of brother- 
hood and fellowship. Founded on the truth 
that God became human, it holds out to all men 
the promise that man shall become Divine — 
not Divine as an isolated being but in fellowship 
with the whole society of redeemed humanity. 

It was noticed by some close friends of West- 
cott that he could only meet the worst exam- 
ples of human depravity with blank incredulity. 
He could not fit them into his scheme of things. 



THE INCARNATION 175 

It was he who, characteristically, pointed out 
the note of hope in the last outcry of Guido 
in Browning's The Ring and the Book. 

You cannot separate Westcott's theology 
from his social teaching. In the Preface of his 
last work, he writes : 

I approached my subject in the light of the Incarna- 
tion ; and I have endeavoured to show from first to last 
how this central fact of history — the life of all life — illum- 
inates the problems which meet us alike in our daily 
work and in our boldest speculations. 

So at a Conference on International Peace 
— a subject very near to his heart — he said : 

The question of international relations has not hitherto 
been considered in the light of the Incarnation, and till 
this has been done, I do not see that we can look for the 
establishment of that peace which was heralded at the 
nativity. 

" The increase of popular power," he said on another 
occasion, " involves the increase of popular responsibility, 
and for the people, as has been truly said by non-Chris- 
tian teachers, every question is finally a religious question." 

But still less can you separate Westcott's 
social teaching from his personality. Like all 
really great teachers, he taught by what he was 
more than by what he said. Words that seem 
tame as we read them now came with the glow- 



176 BISHOP WESTCOTT 

ing force of passionate conviction to those who 
heard them from him. His power did not 
depend on any rhetorical abihty, or tricks of 
oratory. He generally spoke in a quiet and 
restrained manner, though sometimes there was 
the note as of a trumpet in his high, thin voice. 
But I doubt whether any other man of the last 
generation had so great a power of raising any 
question that he touched into the atmosphere 
of eternal things. He made us see that Co-opera- 
tion and Boards of Conciliation and Hague 
Conferences had a spiritual meaning. His whole 
life was one long protest against the identifica- 
tion of spiritual with ecclesiastical things. 

Westcott has often been called a mystic, and 
a mystic he was if a mystic is a man who " sees 
the infinite in things." In the long run a man 
must either come to believe that all life is sacred 
or that all life is secular. His Heaven must 
have no temple, either because " the Lord God 
Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it," 
or because temples have no place in his con- 
ception of life. 

Like all mystics, Westcott was often charged 
with obscurity. There is a very familiar 
story of how ^Dr. Liddon once accounted for a 



SOCIAL TEACHING 177 

sudden fog in the town by conjecturing that 
Westcott must have opened his window ! There 
is a certain class of mind that is always irritated 
by any religious teacher who cannot be labelled. 
But, mercifully for humanity, many of our 
greatest teachers defy our attempts at classifi- 
cation. 

Was Bishop Westcott a Socialist ? Yes, if 
by a Socialist you mean a man who believes, 
with the intensest conviction, that every group 
of men is meant to be a society and not a mere 
aggregation of contending atoms. No, if by a 
Socialist you mean a man who hopes to escape 
from the confusion of our present social con- 
ditions by bringing all alike under the despotism 
of the State. In one of his latest utter- 
ances, he defined the " momentous problem 
of our age " as the reconciliation of " authority 
with freedom, the united action of the Society 
with the conscious and responsible co-operation 
of all its members." 

In many ways Westcott's social teaching 
resembles that of Ruskin, of whose writings 
he was a careful student. Both desire to secure 
for every worker his share of the joy, as well 
as the burden of labour. Both hold that 

L.F.M. N 



178 BISHOP WESTCOTT 

" there is no wealth but life." Both plead for 
simpler ideals, and nobler standards of life. 

We may summarize what remains to be 
said in the answer to two questions. What did 
Birmingham do for Westcott ? and what did 
Westcott do for England ? In regard to the 
first question the Bishop left us in no doubt 
as to the extent of the debt he conceived him- 
self as owing to his native city. On the occa- 
sion of his last visit to Birmingham he said : 

It is impossible to describe the feeling with which 
I stand here this evening in the hall of my native city 
and look back to all that I owed to Birmingham in my school 
years. Those were stirring years. We who passed through 
them felt that the old order was changing, and that a 
revolution was going on about us, the issue of which could 
not be foreseen. The first event of which I have a clear 
recollection was the meeting of the Political Union on 
NewhaU Hill in 1831. I can see stiU the crown and Royal 
Standard in front of the platform, which reassured my 
childish heart, startled by wild words of violence and 
rebellion. The Chartist movement followed soon after. 
I listened to Fergus O'Connor, and I saw the blackened 
ruins in the Bull Ring guarded by soldiers. Then came the 
Corn Law Agitation and the Factory Acts. . . . They 
were stirring times ; political, economic, social, religious 
changes came in quick succession, and, looking forward 
already to the work of a priest and teacher, I watched 
them with the keenest interest. 

Early impressions strike deepest ; and it 



INFLUENCE OF WESTCOTT 179 

was Birmingham that kept Westcott's scholar 
mind in touch with the realities of life and 
that enabled him to keep the scholar's concen- 
tration while he conquered the scholar's aloof- 
ness. 

What did Westcott give to England ? In 
trying to answer that question we need to 
remember that every teacher is of necessity the 
product of his time as well as its maker. Much 
of what Westcott said to us had been said 
already by that great thinker, F. D. Maurice, 
and was being said by other men at the Uni- 
versities and elsewhere. If Westcott's voice 
seemed more potent, it was because his long 
residence at Cambridge brought generations 
of younger minds under his influence. I doubt 
whether he ever understood the younger 
school of Oxford theologians, and I doubt 
even more whether they ever really under- 
stood him. On one occasion he half humor- 
ously complained to Archbishop Benson that 
he had spent days (mostly in vain) in the effort 
to make Oxford men understand Cambridge 
ways of thinking. "Quite naturally," he adds, 
" they forget that there is such a place." But 
if Oxford loves her own prophets best, certainly 



i8o BISHOP WESTCOTT 

we in Cambridge knew that in our three great 
scholars, Lightfoot, Westcott and Hort, there 
had been vouchsafed to us a gift such as does 
not often enrich even an ancient University. 
Perhaps the gift was too great ; perhaps the 
younger men were overshadowed and dwarfed. 
But there are hundreds of clergy now serving 
their own generation in English vicarages or 
in mission stations under other skies, who can 
look back to Westcott's influence and example 
as the inspiration that taught them first truly 
to understand the meaning of the old words, 
" He that is chief among you, let him be the 
servant of all." 

During the nineteenth century the Church 
of England has been influenced by three schools 
of thought that successively arose for the enrich- 
ment of her life. The first of these was the 
evangelical revival. It began during the latter 
half of the eighteenth century, and is associated 
with the names of Wesley, Newton, Wilberforce, 
Simeon, and many others. Its special aim was 
the reassertion of the importance of personal 
religion. It called men from intellectual con- 
troversy to the need of repentance and the 
possibility of holiness. 



INFLUENCE OF WESTCOTT i8i 

The second was the Oxford movement, which 
began about 1830, and among whose leaders 
were Newman, Keble, Pusey and Church. Its 
purpose was to assert that personal religion 
needed incorporation into the life of a society 
— that order and symbolism had their place in 
the world of grace as in the world of nature. 

The third was the movement with which West- 
cott was most closely associated. It began about 
1850 or a little earlier, and among its leaders 
have been Maurice, Kingsley, Westcott, Canon 
Scott Holland and Dr. Gore. Its purpose has 
been to assert that the Christian society is not 
an end in itself but a means to a larger end — that 
the protest for social righteousness, the truceless 
war against all that degrades and divides men, 
is the very purpose for which the Church exists. 

I will not cease from mental fight, 

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, 

Till we have built Jerusalem 

In England's green and pleasant land. 

Those lines of Blake's express the thought 
that men like Bishop Westcott have passed on 
to our own generation. You will hear in an- 
other lecture of this course of another great 
Birmingham citizen, who did much to foster the 



i82 BISHOP WESTCOTT 

same ideal of Christian citizenship among the 
Christian bodies outside the Church of Eng- 
land. To Westcott and Dale alike the Kingdom 
of God was not an impracticable dream, but a 
reality to be achieved here and now by the 
ceaseless effort and unconquerable hope of 
men. 



CARDINAL NEWMAN 

Born 1801. Came to Birmingham, 1847. 
Died, 1890. 

By John H. Muirhead. 

I FEEL that I have a difficult task in the present 
lecture. Newman has been the storm-centre 
of religious debate for nearly three-quarters 
of a century. His name stands for theological 
controversy. He differs, moreover, from the 
other men who have been the texts of these 
lectures, in that while they received much from 
Birmingham, and gave much in return, he 
owed it little but a resting-place. He lived, 
it is true, for the last forty years of his life in 
Birmingham, but he took no part in its business 
or government. He was as effectively cut 
off from its busy life as was the quiet chamber 
in which he thought and wrote, behind these 
great iron railings, from the noise and traffic of 
the Hagley Road. 

But I have a further difficulty. I am speak- 
ing to an audience keenly alive to all pro- 
gressive movements, to whom what is not 
social and democratic does not count ; and I 



183 



i84 CARDINAL NEWMAN 

am going to try to enlist your sympathies 
for a man who not only was not identified with 
any of these movements, but so far as he took 
part in politics at all, strenuously resisted 
reforms which everybody now admits to have 
been just and beneficial — Catholic Emanci- 
pation, the opening of the Universities to 
Dissenters by the abolition of tests, the great 
electoral Reform of 1832 itself. To the end, 
Newman showed little interest in the social, still 
less in the labour movement with which his 
brother-Cardinal, Henry Edward Manning, so 
enthusiastically identified himself. 

Though it would not be difficult, as I hope 
to show, to explain this part of his life, and 
though there is a far more intimate connexion 
between the movement he initiated and the 
present democratic and even socialistic ten- 
dency of the Church of England than might 
appear, this is not the claim I desire to empha- 
size this evening. Even though it could be 
shown that Newman's life and work were 
entirely without manifest fruit in this direction, 
his name would still stand for interests that are 
of the deepest import for human life. If for the 
moment these interests are obscured by others 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 185 

of more immediately pressing importance, and 
by the prevailing tendency of modern thought 
and feeling, there is all the more need to have 
them recalled to our thoughts on an occasion 
like this. 

I am going to ask you to do what you some- 
times find yourselves doing when you look at 
a picture or a landscape : to shut out for the 
moment the brighter and more prominent 
objects and colours in the foreground, in order 
to let the deeper and more delicate values 
that lie in the background have their chance. 

I 

Our first business is to try to comprehend 
the man. This, some one has said, is the sen- 
tence which a great man passes on his time — 
the task of understanding him. It is a par- 
ticularly difficult one in the present case, and 
when we have done our best there will be much 
that remains a mystery. 

Newman's birth coincided with that of the 
nineteenth century. Let me begin by recall- 
ing to your minds some of the chief features of 
the time in which he comes before us — both 
inside and outside the Church of England. 



i86 CARDINAL NEWMAN 

If we were to try to express in a word the 
characteristic note of eighteenth, as contrasted 
with the nineteenth century thought and feel- 
ing, we should find it in a certain hardness 
and clearness of outline with which things 
were felt and seen. "Everything," as one of 
its great writers said, " is what it is and not 
another thing." Everything is isolated and 
rounded into a whole for itself. Going along 
with this was a limitation to the more super- 
ficial qualities of things. It was the age of 
artificiality in poetry, of materialism in science, 
of utilitarianism in morals. But it was in the 
field of politics and religion that the characters 
which have been named came out most strik- 
ingly. In politics it was the age of individual- 
ism, of the rights that separate rather than of 
the duties and the affections that unite. In reli- 
gion it was the age of deism — the doctrine 
that asserts the existence of God, but as of One 
who is far off from nature and human life, 
their well-wisher perhaps, but otherwise aloof 
from their operations. There were of course 
great exceptions. Already, moreover, new 
voices were being heard, notably some great 
poets like Blake and Robert Burns. But 



THE CONDITION OF THE CHURCH 187 

man's spirit as a whole was still in bonds, 
his eyes and heart were still sealed to the new 
visions and the new emotions that were pre- 
paring for him in the coming century. 

Turning to the condition of the Church we 
have to recognize that at no time has the 
Church of England been without witness to the 
power of the Spirit. At the time of which we 
are speaking, the spirit represented by George 
Whiteiield, John and Charles Wesley, still 
survived in the Evangelical party. This kept 
alive in many souls the faith in the Unseen. 
But it was inadequate to the needs of the new 
age. It wanted depth and constructive power. 
It talked much of salvation, but it lacked 
imagination to give meaning and purpose to 
the convert's life. "It treated the soul as 
though it were always coming to Christ, not 
as though it were in Christ and to be kept 
there." ^ It was too ready to compromise 
with the weaknesses of the classes to which it 
appealed. It failed to distinguish between joy 
in life and mere pleasure or sensuous gratifica- 
tion, and while maintaining a strict standard 

^ Abbott, The Anglican Career of Cardinal Newman, 
Vol. I., p. 45. 



i88 CARDINAL NEWMAN 

of moral purity and sobriety, showed itself 
too ready to connive at a life of selfish and 
luxurious comfort. With no coherent philo- 
sophy of its own, moreover, it had nothing to 
oppose to the rising tide of materialistic thought. 
For the rest, the state of the Church is best 
described in the phrase of the time : " high 
and dry. " It took little interest in philanthropy. 
If not actually at ease in Zion (for the clergy 
were often active magistrates and parish rulers) 
its activity could hardly be called spiritual. 
*' The worse members," says a writer, who 
knew it in these days, " were jobbers and 
hunters after preferment, or country gentle- 
men in orders, who rode to hounds, and shot 
and danced and farmed, and often did worse 
things. The average were kindly and helpful, 
but often dull and pompous, and when not 
dull insufferably dogmatic and quarrelsome." 
What was true of the High Church generally, 
was true of the High Church Professors and 
Lecturers at the Universities. One might say 
of them what the prophet Ezekiel said of the 
bones in the valley — "they were very many, 
and lo ! they were very dry ! " i 

^ See Church's Oxford Movement, pp. 3, 4. 



SPIRIT OF NINETEENTH CENTURY 189 

Such in general was the spirit of the time 
at the beginning of the nineteenth century. 
If we were to try to describe what the new 
spirit, as it expressed itself in the best literature 
and life of the coming generation, was, we 
should best do it in terms the opposite of those 
I have been using. I shall not stop to attempt 
it, but try to sum them up in the word that has 
come to be accepted as the most general de- 
scription of them. It was the spirit of romance. 
Though in many respects unsuited to express 
what is meant, romance stands for that earnest 
and imaginative look at things which pierces 
below the hard outlines of their superficial 
appearance to their deeper nature, and there- 
with to their afiinities and deep-set relations 
with other things, bringing into view the links 
that bind man to man, man to nature, nature 
and man to the universal spirit that pervades 
" all thinking things, all objects of all thought." 
If you would understand the men and institu- 
tions or movements of last century, or for the 
matter of that of our own, in any department, 
this is the question you have to ask — the 
test you have to apply : how far are they 
in touch with, how far do they give utterance 



190 CARDINAL NEWMAN 

to, this new spirit ? how far have they still clinging 
about them the remnants and reminiscences 
of the old ? 

Newman was the son of a London banker, 
and a lady of Huguenot extraction, thus 
owning on the one side, like so many great 
Englishmen, a French descent. He was brought 
up in the unromantic suburb of Ealing. 
But the interest of his early years is not in his 
outer circumstances, but in his inner life : 
the books he read and the thoughts they left 
with him. This is true throughout. What- 
ever the interest of the events that were taking 
place in the world about him, it is the events 
of his inner life that claim our attention. It 
is the history of a soul that we are following. 

Of his childhood he himself tells us that he 
had already anticipated an idea that in one 
form or another remained with him to the 
end. " I thought," he says, '' life might be a 
dream, or I an angel, and all this world a 
deception , my feUow-angels by a playful 
device concealing themselves from me and 
deceiving me with the semblance of a material 
world." On the other hand, his boyhood 



CALVINISM 191 

seems to have been occupied with quite other 
thoughts. Tom Paine was the Charles Brad- 
laugh or Robert Blatchford, and David Hume 
the Herbert Spencer or the Professor Huxley 
of these days. At fourteen, he tells us he had 
read all that Paine had to say against the 
Old Testament and Hume against the miracles. 
At least he told his father so, though he thinks 
it may have been merely a boy's swagger — 
put on I suppose to make the good banker's 
flesh creep. It is pleasant to know that he 
was like other boys in one thing at least. 

At fifteen he underwent a great change. 
He " fell under the influence of a definite creed." 
The creed was Calvinism. I do not know 
whether there is any one in this hall except 
myself who was brought up a Calvinist. It 
is a horrible faith. Some parts of it are horribly 
(or at any rate terribly) true ; other parts are 
horribly false. What is true is the momentous- 
ness of the difference between right and wrong, 
and the need in every soul that is going to rise 
to anything worthy of its better nature, of 
some sort of regeneration, some sort of new 
birth. What is false is the doctrine that 
regeneration is a definite unalterable act of 



192 CARDINAL NEWMAN 

favour wrought upon an elect few by a Will 
outside their own, instead of the daily renewal 
of a spiritual life from sources which by the 
grace of a merciful Heaven are open to us all. 
What this faith did for Newman in these days 
was further to isolate him from the objects 
that surrounded him, and deepen his distrust 
of the material world — to lead him, as he says, 
to rest more implicitly in " the thought of 
two, and two only absolute and luminously 
self-evident beings — myself and my Creator." 
His next impressions came from a book I 
can remember well, occupying a small sanctum 
by itself in my grandmother's house. No one 
perhaps reads Scott's Commentary on the Bible 
nowadays, but the influence it exercised in 
the religious life of last century was immense. 
From it Newman tells us he learned two great 
truths : " Holiness better than peace " and 
" Growth the only evidence of life," which he 
took thenceforth for mottoes. These, with the 
deepening of the mind that comes from the 
study of history and the older writers, and 
the balancing doctrine that the Pope was 
Antichrist and Rome the Scarlet Woman, may 
be said to have been the first deposit of religious 
belief in his mind. 



BUTLER'S ANALOGY 193 

The second stratum was partly, one might 
say, of the same material as the first, only a 
more finely granulated form of it, partly it 
was a new and not less significant deposit. 
Bishop Butler's Analogy has probably played 
a greater part than any other single book after 
the Bible in moulding the matter and spirit of 
English theology. It is concerned, as the name 
indicates, with the analogy between the natural 
and the spiritual order, or more strictly between 
natural and revealed religion. We are here 
concerned, not with its detailed argument but 
with the bent it gave to Newman's mind. He 
tells us it affected him powerfully in two re- 
spects. In the first place it extended and 
refined his childish doctrine of angels. These 
now became to him spiritual powers acting 
behind the laws of nature and the wills of 
races and nations and classes of men. " Every 
breath of air and ray of light and heat, every 
beautiful prospect was as it were the skirts 
of their garments, the waving of the robes of 
those whose faces see God. What would be the 
thoughts of a man," he asks, " who when examin- 
ing a flower or herb, or a pebble or a ray of 
light, which he treats as something so beneath 

L.F.M. O 



194 CARDINAL NEWMAN 

him in the scale of existence, suddenly dis- 
covered that he was in the presence of some 
powerful being, who was hidden behind the 
visible things he was inspecting, who though 
concealing his wise hand was giving them their 
beauty, grace and perfection — nay, whose robes 
and ornaments these objects were which he 
was so eager to analyse ? " Such thoughts, he 
tells us, were his. From the same source came 
too, he thought — though here there was room 
for admixture of evil — " the action of bodies 
politic and associations which is often so differ- 
ent from that of individuals who compose them. 
Hence the character and instinct of states and 
governments, of religious communities and 
communions. I thought these assemblages had 
their life in certain unseen powers." It was only 
an extension of this doctrine when he came later 
to realize that Scripture itself " was an allegory : 
pagan literature, philosophy and mythology, 
properly understood, were but a preparation 
for the Gospel. The Greek poets and sages 
were in a certain sense prophets ; for * thoughts 
beyond their thoughts to those high bards 
were given.' " That was the first lesson he 
learned from Butler — a deepening, you will 



FAITH AND REASON 195 

see, of former impressions. His " preference 
for the personal to the abstract " still gave 
it a picturesque form. But stripped of the 
fanciful elements his imagination imported 
into it, this was the same truth that formed 
the inspiration of the new romantic movement 
and lived in the poetry of Burns and Wordsworth 
and Shelley, not to speak of the new voices 
in Tennyson and Browning that were about 
to break the silence. The defect of Newman's 
way of presenting it was that the spiritual 
counterpart was apt to fade away into an un- 
known and unimaginable form of being beyond 
or behind the material and temporal, instead 
of being felt to be the deeper meaning of 
it as the soul is the deeper meaning of the 
body. 

The other lesson he learned from Butler was 
that contained in the philosopher's doctrine 
that " probability " and not logical certainty 
" is the guide of life." Here too we have the 
anticipation of a great truth. It is profoundly 
true that the syllogism and the mathematical 
equation are inapplicable to the deeper truths 
of life and religion. As St. Ambrose said : 
** It has not pleased God to save His 



196 CARDINAL NEWMAN 

people by Logic." ^ But this is wrongly inter- 
preted when it is taken to mean that science 
and philosophy are one thing and rest upon 
reason walking in the light of certainty, 
while Religion is another resting in a faith 
which is always of the nature of a leap in 
the dark, a " venture " not only from the 
known to the unknown but from the known 
to the contrary of the known, from the normal 
to the miraculous. To set faith and reason 
thus in opposition to one another is to set 
human nature against itself, and is a mode of 
stating the foundation or the foundationlessness 
of religion, which is unlikely ever to satisfy the 
human mind. I shall return to this at a later 
point. Meantime it is sufficient to indicate it 
as that which more than anything else separates 
Newman from the main line of philosophical 
thought in his own century. 

I have now traced the history of Newman's 
mind down to his twenty-fifth year. The 
thoughts and beliefs with which he left college 
had a stamp given to them by his own mind, but 
they were in themselves large and genial thoughts 
^ The motto of Newman's Grammar of Assent. 



FELLOW OF ORIEL 197 

which he shared with the greatest minds of his 
own time containing no particular menace 
to anything, far less to the Church and the 
University which he loved. 

What I have now to try to make clear is, 
by what admixture they became the explosive 
compound that was to create the deepest dis- 
turbance that had taken place in either since 
the Reformation, and if not to shatter, at any 
rate to rend asunder one of them in the midst. 

It came from the men with whom he found 
himself when the fellowship at Oriel College, 
Oxford, which he won in 1822, " raised him," 
as he says, " to the high and broad platform 
of University society and intelligence." But 
to explain precisely what it was, and how it 
came, I must recall your minds to the state 
of the country in the later twenties of last 
century. 

It was, you will remember, a period of rising 
Liberalism. The chief intellectual influence of 
the time was that of Jeremy Bentham and his 
school. However narrow Utilitarianism might 
be in morals, economics and religion, it had an 
undoubtedly broadening influence in politics. 
It was the enemy of all sorts of intolerance and 



w 



CARDINAL NEWMAN 



sectarianism, all merely class interests, all that 
existed merely by the right of prescription. 
Particularly it was pledged to the relief of 
Roman Catholics from all civil disabilities owing 
to their religion. But it went further and threat- 
ened Disestablishment. The great reform of 
1832 was already in view which would transfer 
political power to the party that was pledged 
to these things. It was the day of the deliver- 
ance of the State, but it looked as though this 
would be the day of the captivity or the de- 
struction of the Church. Either the Church 
would remain established and become the 
bond-servant of a free-thinking or indifferent 
government, or it would be cast loose to sink 
or swim as one among contending sects. 

It was thoughts like these that were moving 
to their depths the minds of thoughtful and 
zealous churchmen in those days ; among 
others, none more than the mind of John 
Keble. Keble's Christian Year appeared in 
1827. It was published from the retirement 
of the country and anonymously. But Keble 
was no recluse. He followed public events 
with the keenest interest ; had no delusions 
as to the course of things ; asked himself quite 



KEBLE 199 

dejfinitely the questions, where the Church 
would stand m case of disestabhshment, and 
answered with equal clearness and definite- 
ness, " where she had always stood, upon her 
own Catholicity and Apostolicalness." Her 
claim to be the Church of Christ and the in- 
heritor of the Apostles took a new hold upon 
his mind, and formed thenceforth the centre 
of his thoughts. But Keble was no party 
leader to inspire ; he was no preacher to strike 
and subdue ^ ; he was no thinker and theologian 
to strengthen and edify. He lived, moreover, 
in the depths of the country. So far as he 
was concerned this doctrine, after flashing out 
occasionally in his University sermons and 
lectures, might have died and been buried 
with him at Hursley. 

On the other hand, Newman was already 
showing himself to possess all the needed gifts. 
In 1828, moreover, he had been made Vicar of 
St. Mary's and was already speaking to the 
heart from the centre of the great University. 
But there was as yet no connexion between the 
older and the younger man. The connecting 
link was that fiery heart — the Lord Byron of the 
^ Barry's Newman, p. 31. 



200 CARDINAL NEWMAN 

Oxford Movement — Richard Hurrell Froude. 
One is tempted to dwell on this picturesque, al- 
most weird figure. I can only afford to mention 
him here as the torch which kindled the con- 
flagration by indoctrinating Newman with the 
ideas of Keble. " Do you know the story," 
Froude writes, " of the murderer who had 
done one good thing in his life ? Well, if I 
was asked what good deed I have ever done, 
I should say I had brought Keble and Newman 
to understand each other." The opportunity 
came when Froude returned from reading 
with Keble to become Fellow of Oriel in 1826. 
The intimacy deepened in the enforced leisure 
from business that came with the disagreement 
between the Head and Fellows which ended 
in the importation of outside tutors to do the 
work of the College, a kind of academic black- 
leg against whom the regular staff was power- 
less. It was still further deepened by the 
winter which they spent together in the Medi- 
terranean. It was during this time that New- 
man's conviction became fixed. The brilliant 
scenes of the South flitted past him like phan- 
toms. His mind was bent inwards. The future 
was dark and uncertain, but one clear, leading 



THE VIA MEDIA 201 

light was rising before him — the sense of a 
mission to his Church, and as he thought to 
his time and country. It was while tossing 
about in an orange-boat in the Strait of Bonifacio 
that he wrote '' Lead, Kindly Light," the march- 
ing song, as it has been called, of the Trac- 
tarian movement. Surely never a hymn that 
came more directly out of the heart ; perhaps 
none that goes more directly to it. Its very 
title, by which few now know it, " The Pillar of 
the Cloud," adds to its pathos. To Newman 
the sign was too often a pillar of cloud by day — 
a darkening of the light — rather than a pillar 
of fire by night. 

He himself attributes the beginning of the 
movement for the rescue from bondage of the 
Church of England, to a sermon that Keble 
preached on " National Apostasy " in 1833. 
But it was the preparation of the ground in 
Newman's mind, and not the accidental word 
that was the decisive fact — the determination 
with which he landed again in England " to 
force on the public mind, in a way which could 
not be evaded, the great article of the creed, 
* I believe one Catholic and Apostolic Church.' " ^ 
^ Church's Oxford Movement, p. 29. 



202 CARDINAL NEWMAN 

For his new-formed purpose he had an organ 
to his hand in his pulpit at St. Mary's, but 
there was need of the more powerful organ 
of the press. Newman was equal to the 
occasion. To the gifts of the preacher he 
added a consummate talent for the higher 
journalism. The result was the Tracts for 
the Times. Many hands were employed upon 
them ; the inspiring, controlling, directing brain 
was Newman's. This was the beginning of 
the great change. " The new age was upon 
the Church." 

It is impossible to give any adequate idea 
of the issues that were now raised — the amaze- 
ment on the one hand of hope and joyful con- 
fidence, on the other hand of fear and dark 
suspicion that now fell upon men's minds. 
To the one party, the Tractarian Movement 
meant the Romanizing and destruction of the 
Church of England. To the other it seemed the 
dawn of a new life within it, the exaltation 
of its horn at once against free thought, with 
the atheism that must follow, and against the 
Church of Rome. By the intelligent appeal 
to history and tradition, a wall of protection 
might be raised against the devastating flood 



TRACT NINETY 203 

of " Liberalism," while at the same time the 
purity of Anglican doctrine and ritual would 
form a clear and effective barrier against 
Roman corruptions. This was the celebrated 
Via Media, to Newman and his party the one 
clear and sohd footing in the surrounding fen, 
to their opponents a shaking quagmire from 
the beginning. 

So far as its leader was concerned, the move- 
ment fell into two parts. For the first five 
years, with the pulpit of St. Mary's and the 
Tracts as his organs Newman led his gathering 
party through a period of brilliant successes 
only to be followed by a period of disillu- 
sionment and disastrous collapse. The turn- 
ing point was the celebrated Tract Ninety. 
Like the first of the tracts, the last was the 
work of Newman's single hand. Its aim was 
to show that '' the Articles are not framed on 
the principle of excluding those who prefer the 
theology of the early ages to that of the Reform- 
ation. Their framers constructed them in 
such a way as best to comprehend those who 
did not go so far in Protestantism as themselves. 
Anglo-Catholics are but the successors and 
representatives of those moderate reformers ; 



204 CARDINAL NEWMAN 

and their case has been directly anticipated 
in the wording of the Articles." ^ Though 
nothing was affirmed which had not been over 
and over again implied in the previous series, 
this open statement was too much for the 
authorities. In the Church of the time you 
could say what you liked, so long as you said 
it obscurely : so long as you did not say what 
you meant or mean what you said. But here 
was a man who was determined to force his 
doctrine on the public mind, who could say 
what he meant and meant what he said. The 
gathering storm burst. The Tract was de- 
nounced at headquarters, and the denuncia- 
tions of the authorities in turn stirred the 
younger members of the part}/ into more 
startling and uncompromising statements. Be- 
tween the two Newman was between the 
upper and the nether millstone. The history 
is soon told. The " movement " broke into 
two. Pusey and Keble rallied the bulk of the 
party which remained loyal to the Church of 
England, and may since be said to have won 
it to their side. A smaller part stood staunchly 
by Newman, some, like the ablest of them, 
^ Trad Ninety, 2nd edition, pp. 81, 82. 



RECEPTION 205 

W. G. Ward, preceding him, others following 
him to Rome. A few like Froude, the historian, 
and later on Mark Pattison — " the modern 
man," who. Dr. Barry thinks, might under more 
favourable circumstances have done for New- 
man's later life what Hurrell Froude did for 
his earlier — passed to " Liberalism." 

But the interest of these years centred then, 
as it centres still, round the solitary figure in 
the village of Littlemore, to which Newman 
had retired on giving up his pulpit at St. Mary's. 
The Via Media had faded into moonshine and 
the ground was sinking beneath his feet. " From 
the end of 1841," he says, '* I was on my 
deathbed as regards my membership of the 
Anglican Church." But he had still a long 
spiritual conflict before him. It was not till 
four years later that he was received into the 
Church of Rome : the light, you might say, of 
the University, the greatest of its living sons, 
knelt before a simple and ignorant Italian 
Passionist friar in the little room still shown 
in the Free Cottage Library at Littlemore. 

Newman came to Birmingham in 1847 and 
lived in your city for the rest of his life : in it. 



2o6 CARDINAL NEWMAN 

but not of it ; yet perhaps of it too as far as 
it was possible for one like him to be of any 
earthly city. He had come to anchor. He 
had escaped from all intellectual doubts and 
hesitations. Henceforth he lived at peace with 
himself. But at what expense was peace pur- 
chased ? We can understand the cloud of 
Anglican suspicion, almost of execration, under 
which he retired to Edgbaston. But it 
might have been expected that he would have 
been understood and trusted by the Church 
of his adoption — all the more because of the 
sacrifices he had made. The truth was, he 
had drunk too deeply of the Protestant spirit, 
particularly of the doctrine of the rights of 
conscience and of private judgment, to find 
himself wholly at home in the Church of Rome. 
Hence while Protestants found it incompre- 
hensible how an intellect like his could consent 
to submit itself to Papal authority, Catholics 
found it equally impossible to understand 
how, having accepted the light, he should 
still keep peering into the darkness, seeking 
to test the sun of his own rushlight ; how 
having entered the harbour, he should continue 
making his observations and setting his com- 



LIFE AT THE ORATORY 207 

pass as though he were still on the high seas. 

It was not till the publication of his greatest 
book, the Apologia pro Vita Sua in 1864, that 
the cloud of English suspicion was rolled away, 
and not till Leo XIII came to the papal seat 
in 1879 that he received full recognition by 
the Roman Catholic Church. 

Would we know what his life at Edgbaston 
between this and his death in 1890 was, 
we must wait for the Life that is promised from 
the Oratory. Meantime we can perhaps get a 
glimpse of it in his own description of the life 
of St. Philip of Neri, the saint to whom he 
dedicated himself when he entered the Church 
of Rome. " He was not a hunter of souls, 
but preferred tranquilly to cast in his net to 
gain them ; he preferred to yield to the stream 
and direct the current which he could not stop 
of science, literature, art and fashion, and to 
sweeten and to sanctify what God had made 
very good and man had spoilt. Whatever 
was exact and systematic pleased him not, 
he put from him monastic rule and authorita- 
tive speech as David refused the armour of 
his king. He did not so much seek his own, 
as draw them to him. He sat in his small 



2o8 CARDINAL NEWMAN 

room and they in their gay, worldly dress, 
the rich and the well born as well as the simple 
and the illiterate crowded into it. He was all 
things to all men. When he was called upon to 
be merry he was so ; if there was a demand upon 
his sympathy he was equally ready. He gave 
the same welcome to all, wearying himself to 
assist all to the utmost limits of his power." 
Newman died in 1890. He lies buried in the quiet 
burial-ground at Rednal beside the Lickeys. 
His memorial tablet is in the Church of the 
Oratory, and bears beneath the Cardinal's 
shield with its motto — " Cor ad cor loquitur " : 
heart speaketh unto heart — the simple inscrip- 
tion of his name, with the words, also chosen 
by himself — "Ex umbris et imaginibus in veri- 
tatem " : from shadows and semblances to the 
truth. 

II 

I have tried to make Newman's life com- 
prehensible in the light of one central con- 
viction, his faith in the Unseen, and the strong 
reaction this set up in his mind against the 
shallow popular philosophy of his time. But 
something — perhaps the chief thing — remains 



NEWMAN AND CARLYLE 209 

still obscure. Others shared this conviction. 
It might be said to have been the note of the 
deeper mind of the time. It meant, as we now 
see, a forward movement to a larger faith in 
man, a deeper conception of God and His mode 
of operation in the world, a wider interpre- 
tation of what is meant by revelation. In 
spite of his belief in Conscience, Newman 
seemed to end in a distrust of human nature, 
a doubt as to whether there is any real evidence 
of the control of men's hearts by the divine, 
and an overmastering need to find a rest for 
his faith in some authoritative utterance coming 
from without. It was as though he had only 
got out into the stream to be caught in a back 
current and carried further up than the point 
from which he started. This is brought out 
by the contrast his life and teaching offer to 
those of his great contemporary Carlyle. " Two 
writers," says Froude, " have affected power- 
fully the present generation of Englishmen, 
Newman is one, Thomas Carlyle is the other." 
In Carlyle more than any one else we see the 
great forces of the century awakening and 
stretching themselves — with some grotesqueness 
of gesture, it is true, but powerfully and 

L.F.M. P 



210 CARDINAL NEWMAN 

effectively. Like Newman he was a lover of 
the past and the ages of faith, but he recognized 
that they were also the ages of childhood : he 
felt that their darknesses and credulities were 
things of the past. He believed in the Church, 
but it was the Church of the future whose 
" organic filaments " were coming together 
in obscure corners with quite other binding 
power than that of the authority of any man 
or any tradition. He believed in God, but it 
was a God who revealed Himself every- 
where in nature and history, " weaving in 
time," not in any one time alone, " the 
garment we know him by " — whose best 
and greatest was not in the past but in the 
future. Whence the difference ? 

To understand it we must come back to 
a point where we all are one. Here we are 
in this " bank of time," the meeting-point, 
as Carlyle himself would say, of two eternities — 
all with one supreme human interest how to 
find assurance that we are not mere creatures 
of the moment, but parts of an eternal order, 
and that not as atoms might be parts of an 
eternal matter — drops of an eternal ocean, 
but lives and souls of an eternal Life or Soul, 



DISTRUST OF REASON 211 

minds and wills of an eternal Mind and 
Will. 

Let now a man be convinced that this is 
the deepest, most precious of all truths ; but 
let him be all in the dark as to how he is to 
come to assurance of it by way of human 
knowledge and inference. Let him even be 
assured that the human reason is a false light, 
sure if we put our trust in it alone to lead us 
further from the central truth on which he 
feels that salvation depends. On the other 
hand, let him have been brought up in the 
belief that out of the darkness at a particular 
time and through a particular organ the 
Eternal had once spoken in human voice and 
that the assurance which he seeks can be 
attained only by once for all renouncing the 
guidance of reason and accepting the outer 
testimony in simple trust. What choice, under 
these circumstances, would he have ? To one 
to whom this outer voice was incredible, who 
held that natural experience and the reasoning 
founded upon it were the one path to whatever 
truth was attainable, such a renunciation 
would seem like putting out one's eyes in order 
to see. But to the seeker for assurance him- 



212 CARDINAL NEWMAN 

self it would seem like keeping open the single 
window that looked out on Eternity. ^; 

Some such was Newman's case. No man 
had ever a profounder faith in the reality of the 
Unseen. No man had ever a more insistent 
craving to have a reasoned assurance of it. 
Yet this was just what his age seemed to show 
to be impossible. To cast off authority and seek 
to justify this belief through reason and philo- 
sophy, could only end in one way. Here there 
was no Via Media. On the one hand was faith, 
on the other reason. These two led opposite 
ways and there was no third. This opposition 
between faith and reason was an antithesis 
he never got beyond. More than anything 
else it is the light in which we must read his 
mental history. He held it at the outset. He 
held it at the end. The intermediate period 
was occupied in realizing what it involved. 
As he himself puts it — " Turn away from the 
Catholic Church and to whom will you go ? 
It is your only chance of peace in this turbulent 
and changing world. There is nothing between 
it and scepticism." ^ Much indeed still remained 
dark to him. The doctrines of the Church were 
^ Discourses to Mixed Congregations, 



THE ONE GROUND 213 

changing from age to age. At best perhaps 
they were only symbols of deeper unimagin- 
able things, " the expressions in human lan- 
guage of truths to which the human mind is 
unequal." But such as they were, they were 
our only guide. 

He was like a man who finds himself on a 
steep mountain side with a narrow ledge to 
stand upon, a cave of comparative shelter and 
safety behind him. Above him far away is 
the clear mountain top with its sunshine and 
peace, its true outlook on the world around. 
But how to get there he knows not, no map 
which he has shows the way. There is, indeed, 
a path which appears to lead forwards but it 
leads only downwards, and from what he knows 
or thinks he knows of the fate of those who have 
taken it there is little encouragement to try 
it. Is it much wonder that in these circum- 
stances he clings to his ledge for such assurance 
of safety as it can give, or seeks a larger and 
more commodious resting-place that offers easy 
approach along the path by which he has come ? 
But suppose the maps and the observations 
on which his estimate of the forward path is 
founded, are old and out of date. Suppose 



214 CARDINAL NEWMAN 

the path, though apparently starting down- 
wards and full of peril, turns nevertheless in 
the end upwards, and leads always to fuller 
light. In such a case it would be possible to 
see and sympathize with the life and teaching 
of this great lonely pilgrim, to reahze the pathos, 
the sincerity, and the essential truth of his 
underlying faith, and yet to feel that the 
position he has taken up is no true resting- 
place for us who have other lights to guide us. 
This I wish to suggest is what has actually 
happened. Already in Newman's time there 
were other thoughts of the evidences for the 
great truths for which he stood. Since he 
wrote, these have become widely known, and 
taken hold of the mind of large sections of the 
Christian world, entirely altering the intellectual 
outlook. What in detail these are, where 
they have come from and what they seem to 
justify, is too long a story to enter upon here. 
What is clear to any one who can read the 
signs of the times, is that among Protestants 
and Catholics alike there has spread in these 
days a conviction that human experience, both 
inner and outer, when rightly interpreted, not 
only does not contradict, but offers reliable 



PURPOSE IN THE WORLD 215 

evidence for the existence of a spiritual purpose 
in human affairs. Not only in the voice of 
conscience which Newman admitted, but in 
the course of human development which he 
refused as evidence, it has become possible for 
us to read the signs of purpose and guidance. 
To take but one example, was there a single 
man whose heart and mind did not respond 
the other day, when at your Annual Meeting 
a leading speaker broke from the level of the 
commonplace with the words, " I believe there 
is a divine purpose in democracy ! " ^ 

I do not wish to pursue this thought but 
to apply it at once to the opposition between 
faith and reason on which Newman's teaching 
rests. It is true that it is a different thing 
to believe in the end of life, to " trust the 
larger hope," and to believe in a mathematical 
equation. But this is not a difference between 
beliei upon more and upon less valid evidence- 
It is not a difference of degree but of kind. Let 
me try to illustrate from the latter example. 
You have heard of the man who refused to 
admit that one and one are two till he knew 
what was going to be made of the admission. 
^ Speech by Bishop Gore. 



2i6 CARDINAL NEWMAN 

It seems absurd, but there is a good deal to be 
said for his caution. When the certainty of 
figures is pressed upon me I often feel inclined 
to reply — " I acknowledge your equation but I 
can make nothing of it — in fact I do not believe 
it unless you will condescend to tell me what 
one and one you mean." 

Here are two men in a college lecture-room. 
Each is one, but one and one do not make 
two men, but tutor and student, and this is 
different. If you ask me what makes the 
difference, what it is that is added, I answer^ 
it is the whole world of knowledge and of the 
purposes of life. I agree that I cannot show 
it by another equation. If you like to say I 
know it by faith, you may do so. But it is 
a faith which is not different from my reasoning 
as the uncertain or the unknown from the 
certain and the known. Rather it differs from 
equational logic as the more comprehensive 
and significant from the less, even as life itself 
differs from mathematics. 

Though different then, faith and reason can- 
not be opposed. Faith indeed leaps to the end. 
It is the completion of what our reason leaves 
incomplete. But we should never reason un- 



UNITY OF FAITH AND REASON 217 

less we had faith in the ends of reason. As 
Pascal (another of Newman's great masters) 
said, '' We should never seek for God unless 
we had already found Him." It is this con- 
viction of the unity of faith and reason in all 
human experience which underlay the teaching 
of Carlyle and made it so fruitful in his time. 
But it was a truth that was hidden from New- 
man, partly, we now see, by reason of the 
narrowness of his own intellectual training ; 
partly by the intellectual timidity which was 
so marked a feature of his mind. With the 
recognition of this truth there falls away the 
fatal alternative which his teaching offers. 

If it be asked how, in spite of this, the repre- 
sentatives of the newer thought in the Church 
of Rome can yet appeal, as Father Tyrrell does 
in the Hibbert Journal of January of the present 
year,^ to the teaching of Newman, in support 
of the tendencies which he represents, the answer 
is not far to seek. An honest perusal of the 
chief of his writings leaves no doubt at all that 
he is a devout believer in the ordinary Roman 
Catholic doctrines — the miraculousness of the 
Church, the unity and coherence of Romanist 
theology which must be accepted whole or not 

1 1908. 



2i8 CARDINAL NEWMAN 

at all, the infallibility of the interpretations 
of Council and Pope. In harmony with all 
this is his account of faith as acceptance on 
authority of what we cannot know. " By 
* faith ' I mean the Creed and assent to the 
Creed." ^ With this before him Father Gerard 
in the same number of the Hihhert Journal 
can say " the difference between Newman 
and his alleged successors is fundamental and 
absolute." On the other hand, Newman was 
far too sensitive to the deeper currents of the 
thought about him, far too deeply touched 
with the spirit of his time, not to feel that there 
was a deeper than any external authority, and 
that revelation can be no isolated or completed 
process. Hence it comes that it is possible 
to read not only between the lines but, in many 
finely expressed passages of his greatest books, 
suggestions of a teaching, " hints and seeds of 
thought," incompatible with the older doctrines. ^ 
This is particularly manifest in his theory of 
the Development of Doctrine. It would cer- 
tainly be wrong to attribute to Newman writing 

^ Anglican Difficulties. 

2 See e.g. Grammar of Assent, 4th ed., pp. 349-51, 
353. 386-8, 402, 410, 429, 486. 



MODERNISM 219 

in 1845 the idea of development that Darwin 
announced in his Origin of Species in 1859. In 
Newman's exposition there is much that is 
arbitrary and artificial. Yet the truth remains 
that he clearly conceived of ideas and doctrines, 
and among them those of Christianity, as hav- 
ing had to enter into conflict for existence with 
other ideas, and as having been subjected in 
the process to transformations and enlarge- 
ments comparable to those of organic growth.^ 
Such a view is clearly incompatible with belief 
in a body of doctrine inalterably stereotyped 
for all time, and handed on from age to age for 
uncritical acceptance by the Christian world. 
With this in view his Roman Catholic biographer 
can write with truth that Newman "has reacted 
on the mental habits of those whom he joined 
by teaching them a language they could not 
have gained without him, modelling afresh 
their methods of Apologetics," ^ and Father 
Tyrrell can maintain the essential " solidarity 
of Newmanism with modernism." 

With the results of this attempt to under- 

^ See Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 
chapter i., section i. 

2 See Dr. Barry's Newman, p. 275 and following. 



220 CARDINAL NEWMAN 

stand the man, the movement which he initiated, 
and the immediate and remoter bearing of his 
thought before us, we come back to the question 
with which we started — the capitaHzed value 
of his teaching for us. So far I may be said 
to have advanced to an answer in connecting 
him with ideas and feehngs characteristic of 
the deeper mind of the nineteenth century. 
But others, we have seen, gave utterance to 
these ideas with equal conviction and with 
greater force and consistency. Is the conclusion 
then that Newman merely succeeded in ex- 
pressing in a weaker and more effeminate form 
the great truths for which these others stood ? 
It has been said of Newman's poetry that it is 
the poetry of Wordsworth cast in the language 
of women. Is this all that we can say of his 
teaching in general ? I think there is more. 
I. Others taught the reality of the Unseen. 
To Newman it was given to realize it as a 
constant inward presence, the source of an 
inward ideal of purity and fullness of spiritual 
life. Inward perfection better than peace; 
growth the mark of life : we have seen how 
early he took these as his watchwords. In 
the teaching of Carlyle there is little of this 



THE IDEA OF A SAINT 221 

His is a gospel of work. God is manifested 
in the hero, and the hero is the swallower of 
formulas, too often of scruples. Newman holds 
up the opposite and complementary ideal — 
the ideal of the saint, the devoted or devout. ^ 
Taken alone this also has its weakness. It is 
too apt to fade away into scrupulosity, un- 
reality and ineffectiveness, or to be connected 
with some single and partial obj ect . Nevertheless 
it is one the world cannot afford to do without. 
It is the ideal of Buddha and of Socrates, of 
the Hebrew prophets, and of the Greatest of 
them, of St. Francis and St. Catherine, of John 
Stuart Mill as well as of John Henry Newman. 
It is this that gives beauty and refinement 
to character and in its best types is recognized 
as the very crown of life. In times like our own, 
full of the call to social work and social reform, 
there is a real danger of its being overlooked. 
No thought and effort can be too great in the 
cause of material reform. But the reformer can 
never safely forget what it is in the last resort 
that makes the life for which we strive worth 
striving for, and that sustains us in striving for 

^ See especially " Saintliness, the Standard," Discourses 
to Mixed Congregations, v. 



222 CARDINx\L NEWMAN 

it. Movements, like men, have their souls, not as 
something in the next world, but as what makes 
life worth having in this. What shall it profit 
the best of them if they gain the whole world, 
and lose their own soul ? or what will they 
give in exchange for their soul ? 

2. This is the first truth for which Newmanism 
stands : what he called the '' idea of a saint." 
The second is closely related to it. It is the 
need of organized spiritual fellowship if the 
soul is to rise to the height of its calling. Re- 
generation is no individual matter. It can only 
be begun, continued and perfected in a society 
devoted to that end — in a " fellowship of the 
saints." It was the perception of this truth 
that explains the central place in human life, 
that Newman assigned to the Church. To 
it are committed the means of grace. " The 
Church," he says, " aims at three special 
virtues as reconciling and uniting the soul to 
its Maker, — faith, purity and charity, — for 
two of which the world cares nothing. The 
Church regards, consults for, labours for the 
individual soul; her one object is to quit her- 
self of this responsibility, to take offences out 
of the way, to rescue from evil, to convert^ 



THE IDEA OF A CHURCH 223 

teach, feed, protect, perfect. Good and evil 
to her are not Hghts and shades passing over 
the surface of society, but living powers spring- 
ing from the depths of the heart." ^ Here 
; 00, doubtless, there is room for fatal mistake. 
Belief in the place and power of the Church in 
the life of the soul is apt to degenerate into a 
belief in the special and miraculous sanctity 
of some particular Church. But this is one 
of the things the human mind is likely to out- 
grow, has indeed, in the view of many, already 
outgrown. The idea itself will not grow old — 
the idea of a fellowship of men and women 
" holding the unity of the Spirit in the bond 
of peace " with a tradition, a continuity, an 
atmosphere of its own — a meeting-place, a ser- 
vice and a ritual, however simple, round which 
associations may gather — calls and directions 
to human service, in which mind and char- 
acter may find their discipline, and religion 
its reality. 

It is a long cry from the rich, august, 
historic Church to which Newman looked, 
to these last products of Democracy, the 

^ DifflcuUies felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching, 
chapter viii (condensed). 



224 CARDINAL NEWMAN 

Adult Classes and the Labour Churches of 
our own city. But it is the same human 
need that has given birth to both ; it is the 
same spirit and, if not the same belief, I think 
we may say that it is the same faith that 
underlies the work of the teachers, adminis- 
trators, members of both. 

It is the clearness with which Newman 
realized these two complementary ideas, the 
idea of inward devotedness and the idea of an 
outward and visible embodiment of spiritual 
fellowship that lifts his teaching above the 
limitations of time and circumstance, and gives 
him the place that Froude claims for him as 
one of the two great centres of spiritual influence 
in the nineteenth century. 



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SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 

Born in Birmingham, 1833. Died in London, 1898. 

By R. Catterson Smith 

Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Bart., was born in 
this city on August 28, 1833, at No. 11, Ben- 
nett's Hill — a house on the left hand as you 
walk up the hill from New Street. It is now 
marked by a tablet between the first floor 
windows. His mother died within a week of 
his birth. His father was a framemaker, carver 
and gilder by trade, but not of the successful 
type. He said of him : " My father was a 
very poetical Httle fellow, tender-hearted and 
touching, quite unfit for the world into which 
he was pitched. We had very, very few books, 
but they were poets all of them, and I remember 
when I was about twelve or so he used to read 
to me little poems he made himself, but as time 
went on he grew shy of reading them to 
me. He used to read in a very touching voice, 
melodious and pathetic, believing everything he 

L.F.M. 225 Q 



226 SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 

read. I never heard such sympathetic reading. 
And he beheved all good things that were ever 
said of any one and was altogether unworldly 
and pious. Like his countrymen he knew no- 
thing at all of art, and couldn't understand 
what it was all about or why it should be ; but 
for Nature he had a passion, and would seldom 
miss a sunrise if it could be seen, and would 
walk tired miles to see a cornfield." With 
that statement we must be satisfied, if we are 
seeking in parents or ancestors for indications 
of the gifts which blossomed in the boy. It 
would have been interesting to us in this city 
if he had come of a line of jewellers. 

The child seems to have been delicate and 
was, in consequence, sent into the neighbouring 
country constantly for the sake of fresh air. 
One place he remembered late in life was caUed 
" Nineveh," which was probably mixed up in his 
mind with the Biblical city of that name. 
Doubtless those little trips to the green fields 
and flowers fed the fast-opening soul of the 
little boy with impressions which were after- 
wards given back to the world in the back- 
grounds of pictures of most romantic charms. 

In 1844 at eleven years of age he became a 



SCHOOL DAYS 227 

pupil at King Edward's School, New Street, 
being placed on the commercial, but later on 
the classical side, I suppose from indications 
he showed of being gifted in that direction. So 
far as his drawing went in school, his master 
— Thomas Clarke — reported that his " drawing 
might be better if he exhibited more industry." 
It appears, however, that he showed consider- 
able industry in drawing out of his head, and 
he had a reputation amongst the boys for 
drawing devils. 

Books on history and romance in prose and 
verse he devoured. Msop's Fables was a 
special favourite ; while from Macpherson's 
Ossian he says he got his first love for Celtic 
lore. 

He had a strong predilection for matters 
theological and ecclesiastical, as may be seen by 
letters he wrote. He fancied signing himself — 

" Edw. C. B. Jones. 
" Archbishop of Canterbury (Elect). 
" Edguard Cardinal de Birmingham." 

He evidently steeped himself in the pictur- 
esqueness of Church usages, and that feeling 
appears never to have left him through life. 
At seventeen years of age we find a few indica- 



228 SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 

tions of his powers of drawing, or perhaps I 
should say his power of graphic expression, a great 
advance upon the devils of two years before. The 
group of people, like a football scrum — the recep- 
tion of a returning relative — is full of representa- 
tive fun, invention and observation, not giving 
the least hint of the special developments of the 
future artist. Perhaps the drawing in a letter 
to his father from London, a memory of the 
British Museum, may suggest the future a little 
more. 

The year 1852 was the 300th anniversary of 
the foundation of King Edward's School, in 
commemoration of which prizes were offered 
for essays. Edward Burne-Jones as a candidate 
for one of these wrote an essay on " The state 
of literature in England in the time of Edward 
the Sixth," but he was not successful in winning 
the exhibition or scholarship which would have 
paid his way in Oxford, to which University 
his father had decided to send him. Before 
leaving his school period I should like to give 
his tribute to one of his teachers. Though I 
think it well to say that he nearly always steeped 
his admiration in the sweet essence of his mind, 
he always romanced. 



ABRAHAM KERR THOMPSON 229 

" At Bideford," he writes, " died the only master I 
ever had who had any brains. His name was Abraham 
Thompson, a doctor of divinity he was ; black hair grew 
on the back of his hands which I used to marvel at ; he was 
very handsome and black. Funny httle boys are — how 
they watch. He could be very angry and caned furiously; 
at times I caught it. I think he grew very poor in his 
last years and had the school at Bideford. I never heard 
about him at the end. I worshipped him when I was 
little, and we used to look at each other in class. I wonder 
what he thought when he looked ; / used to think Abraham 
of the Chaldees was like him. I was always sorry that 
he was called Thompson, for I liked lovely names — should 
have liked one myself and a handsome form — yes I should. 
So that was Thompson. I have thought how far more 
needful with a lad is one year with a man of intellect than 
ten years of useless teaching. He taught us few facts, 
but spent all the time drilling us that we might know what 
to do with them when they came. Abraham Kerr Thomp- 
son, that was his name, I wonder if any one remembers 
him. A strange thing he would do, unlike any other I 
ever heard of ; he would call up the class, and open any 
book and make the head boy read out a chance sentence, 
and then he would set to work with every word — how it 
grew and came to mean this or that. With the flattest 
sentence in the world he would take us to ocean waters 
and the marches of Babylon and hills of Caucasus and 
the wilds of Tartary and the constellations and abysses of 
space. Yes, no one ever taught me anything but he 
only." 

This passage gives a good idea of his manner 
of speech which had a certain playfulness with 
a touch of whimsicality in it. 



230 SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 

In 1853 we find him in Oxford at Exeter 
College, somewhat disappointed. The reli- 
gious enthusiasm with which the writings of 
Cardinal Newman had inspired him, gave him 
great hope that there he would find fervid and 
learned men on every side — he found languor and 
indifference instead. But if he found short- 
comings in that direction, he found a life-long 
friend in that wonder of men, William Morris. 
Both these men were intended for the Church 
by their parents, but other forces were at work 
as well as the decision of parents. 

" The daily work of the schools," he says, 
speaking of himself and Morris, "was un- 
interesting to them, and made absolutely 
desolate by the manner of teaching ; but little 
by little we fed ourselves with the food that 
fitted us." 

That food was the reading of Ruskin, Tenny- 
son, Carlyle, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Malory's 
Morte d' Arthur and everything they could get 
dealing with mediae valism. 

They paid a visit to London and saw several 
pre-Raphaelite pictures, amongst them Madox 
Brown's " Last of England." But the picture 
which delighted them the most was one by 



t 



VISITS NORTH FRANCE 231 

D. G. Rossetti of Dante drawing an angel when 
he was disturbed by " certain people of import- 
ance." 

In one of the long vacations they decided 
to form a party and visit the churches of Nor- 
thern France — Morris had been there the year 
before and reported their magnificence. 

They went straight from Boulogne to Abbe- 
ville, where they arrived late in the evening, 
but Morris, the eager, the strong and the restless, 
was up and about early next morning, and 
they wandered the streets before breakfast. 
Off again in the afternoon for Amiens. They 
saw Beauvais, Paris with Notre Dame, the 
Cluny Museum and the Louvre. At the Louvre 
Morris led Burne-Jones blindfold up to Fra 
Angelico's Coronation of the Virgin, that he 
might see him under the shock of sudden delight. 
They also saw Chartres and Rouen. On their 
way home on the quay of Havre at night they 
definitely resolved to devote their lives to 
Art — Morris to be an architect and Burne- 
Jones to be a painter. " That was the most 
memorable moment of my life," says Burne- 
Jones. 

Before leaving Oxford in fulfilment of this 



232 SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 

resolve, the idea of publishing a magazine ^ which 
would give the ideas of the little set of enthusiasts 
of which these two men were the centre, was 
formed. The expense was to fall on Morris, as 
he was the moneyed man. By Burne- Jones's 
contributions to it, it was shown that he had 
fine literary gifts. His most important contribu- 
tion was an essay on Thackeray's The Newcombs, 
then just published, in which he expressed 
some of his artistic faith as well as his high 
admiration of the gifts of Thackeray. Two 
sentences will suffice to show the serious and 
exalted state of his mind. 

When shall we learn to read a picture as we would a 
poem, to find some story from it, some little atom of human 
interest that may feed our hearts ? 

An artist should be no faint echo of other men's 
thoughts, but a voice concurrent or prophetical, full of 
meaning. 

Busy while at Oxford with book learning, he 
was by no means neglectful of art — for he was 
continually designing— we hear of designs from 
the Lady of Shalott, and illustrations to the 
Fairy Family, by Archibald Maclaren. Doubt- 
less many others were in hand which never saw 

1 The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine. Twelve parts 
were all that appeared, 1856. 



II 



FIRST MEETS ROSSETTI 233 

completion, or have been lost in the course of 
time. 

He never took a degree at Oxford. ^ He left 
the University in 1855. Then began his artistic 
life in real earnest, the first great event in which 
was his meeting with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 
which took place one night at the Working 
Man's College, where Ruskin, Rossetti and 
others took part in the teaching. The impres- 
sion made upon Rossetti by young Burne-Jones 
is expressed in a letter from Rossetti to a friend, 
thus : 

One of the nicest young fellows in — dreamland. 

The friendship with Rossetti grew, and with 
it the stimulus of his fine work and as fine a 
personality — such a personality that I have 
heard Morris say whatever Rossetti said became 
a fixed law for them. 

Burne-Jones had no regular art training. 
He did while in Birmingham attend a school 
of design three evenings a week, but now that 
he had launched out into the career of an 
artist he felt severely his want of executive 
power, and to help himself in this respect he 

^ He was made an honorary D.C.L. in 1881, and Honorary 
Fellow of Exeter College in 1882. 



234 SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 

attended the drawing and painting classes at 
Leigh's School in Newman Street, Oxford Street. 
This was a private school whereto went art 
aspirants — art heretics very often — who did 
not enter the Royal Academy or other schools 
that had regular systems through which the 
pupils had to wade. That was all the art 
schooling Burne-Jones ever had, I believe. 

Of this period are several designs clearly 
inspired by Rossetti, of which " Going to 
Battle " is one. In it will be seen the deliberate 
imitation of Rossetti' s manner of representing 
the watery ripple of hair — which has been 
carried by that artist to a beauty never attained 
before, to my knowledge. 

Suddenly we find Edward Burne-Jones in 
correspondence with Ruskin. He writes to his 
friend Mr. Cormell Price : 

I'm not Ned any longer. I'm not Edward Burne- 
Jones any longer. I've dropped my personality. I'm 
a correspondent with Ruskin, and my future title is the 
man who wrote to Ruskin and got an answer by return. 

His first actual meeting with Ruskin took 
place in 1856, when he was twenty-four years 
of age. He records their meeting in a letter : 

Just come back from being with our hero for four 



ROSSETTI'S ADVICE 235 

hours. So happy we've been : he is so kind to us : calls 
us his dear boys, and makes us feel such old friends. To- 
night he comes down to our rooms to carry off my draw- 
ing and show it to lots of people ; to-morrow night he 
comes again, and every Thursday night the same — isn't 
that like a dream ? 

The rooms referred to were the rooms in which 
he and William Morris lodged — and for which 
William Morris was having furniture made after 
his own designs. In true mediaeval fashion 
they were being painted upon by Rossetti and 
Burne-Jones. 

Burne-Jones painted a little in the studio of 
Rossetti. But of more value to him than the 
actual painting was the guiding advice Rossetti 
gave him — indeed, the guiding principle of his 
artistic life — which he has recorded in the 
following words: 

He taught me to have no fear or shame of my own 
ideas, to design perpetually, to seek no popularity, to 
be altogether myself, and this not in any words I can 
remember, but in the tenor of his conversation always, 
and in the spirit of everything he said. So what I chiefly 
gained from him was not to be afraid of myself, and to 
do the thing I liked most : but in those first years I never 
wanted to think but as he thought, and all he did and 
said fitted me through and through. 

What does this advice, Not to be afraid, or 
ashamed of his own ideas, mean ? We must 



236 SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 

be clear upon that point if we are to get at the 
underlying principle of Burne- Jones's art. 

The answer is, that there were several paths 
open to the young man — several schools of 
painting into which he might drift. There 
was the residue of the school of which Reynolds 
and Gainsborough were the greatest ornaments — 
which came down to us through Sir Thomas Law- 
rence, Sir Benjamin West, Sir Charles Eastlake : 
the art of fiunkeydom it might be called, which 
had wasted the talents of many a gifted one. 
There was a school of painting which dealt with 
the appearances of actual life. And there was the 
school which dealt with those visions or dreams 
which spring within the mind from its contact 
with old legends, and from thoughts which have 
to be expressed by allegories and symbols. Ros- 
setti saw in the young man the rare capacity 
to become an artist of the latter school, but he 
also knew that the surrounding influences were 
likely to work against that capacity, and to 
fill his mind with doubts as to the wisdom of 
following such visions and dreams. He may 
also have feared that his young disciple might 
think it necessary to trim his ideas to bring 
them into line with work of the sort that had 



MICHAEL ANGELO'S MOSES 237 

been done or was being done, that the fear 
of being unusual might get hold of him. 

Let us take another view of the matter. We 
all have a double power of vision. We have 
eyes which see the outer world, and we have 
eyes which see the world within our minds — a 
world wherein wander all kinds of dim dreams 
and memories. Each of these worlds is equally 
real, equally natural. A few of us have our 
mind-eyes more open than our outer-world 
eyes, most of us have very dim mind-eyes. 
What are those mind images like as a rule ? 
Vague enough, I think. 

Take any well-known legendary person such 
as Moses. We have all heard of him often 
enough to have formed some impression of him. 
Well, what is that impression ? Michael Angelo 
made a great statue in marble of him, which is 
in Rome in one of the churches. It gives the 
impression he formed of Moses. He conceives 
of him as a great force — a great leader of men. 
It will be remembered that " horns of light " 
stood out of his head — Michael Angelo has put 
horns on him, but they are short horns like 
those on a young bull. Did he intend them to 
look like horns of light, or did he put them there 



238 SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 

to be a sign of Moses ? I think he put them 
there because they suggested to his mind 
the wilderness and the reversion of man 
through forty years of wandering there to his 
primitive life amid shepherds and goats. You 
and I do not translate them into horns 
of light — but they convey to us a goatlike 
suggestion — which is also helped out by the 
long, ropey beard. The costume is not Egyp- 
tian nor in any way local or belonging to an 
historic period. It rather looks like pieces of 
drapery tied rudely on — as might be supposed 
to happen in the case of men wandering where 
all the formal clothes of civilization would have 
disappeared. That rendering of Moses by 
Michael Angelo I think falls in with, and em- 
bodies, the vague general impression we have 
of him ; and once having seen that figure, I 
think it takes its place in our minds as a 
wonderful interpretation of that great fierce 
lover of liberty wandering in the wilderness, 
who saw God face to face. 

William Blake translated the Book of Job 
in the same way, and I am informed that an 
eminent translator of the books of the Bible 
says that Blake's rendering of it gives the truest 



MORTE D'ARTHUR 239 

impression of the original. Burne-Jones has 
done similar work, though not on the same 
high plane. 

Such men we may call translators of the 
visions of the mind. The order of men who 
people the mind's world for us who have less 
clear seeing. 

I have just said Burne-Jones has done similar 
work " though not on the same high plane." 
I think the difference between Burne-Jones and 
these two men is, that they thought less of 
beauty than of the idea they were expressing, 
while he thought more of beauty than of the 
idea. He was more of a decorator and less of 
a visionary than they were. 

Burne-Jones's pictures of King Arthur and 
the Knights of the Round Table have visualized 
for many of us the glamour of that strange 
period outside actual history. We may not 
care about its kings and queens, and ever fight- 
ing knights, its plotting ladies, its wizardry, 
its illicit loves made so beautiful as to be almost 
justified, with self-renunciation lifted to the 
highest virtue, and the mysterious quest of 
the cup which received the blood-drops of Christ 
when he hung on the Cross — 



240 SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 

So haggard and so woe-begone. 

That sort of thing was in the air then : 
Tennyson had dressed it sweetly for drawing- 
room use — Rossetti, Morris and others were 
singing it too — and the cultured classes were 
crying out for more. 

It is beautiful in its own unreal way. But 
we have wakened to a wider view of things. 
Although Burne-Jones knew it to be a Celtic 
story he did not dress his people in historic 
Celtic garb, nor did he use Celtic ornament to 
decorate them. His shields are not Celtic, 
nor his armour, nor his architecture. He did 
not want to represent an historic period, but 
to translate the impressions that the legend 
made on his mind, and he has done so in a most 
wonderful and convincing manner, endowing 
them with a sense of mystery unique in art. 

The danger likely to beset an artist who 
relies upon the visions or fancies of his mind is 
that he is apt to drift further and further 
from wide human interests and from the natural 
appearances with which other people are fami- 
liar, and to cultivate idiosyncrasies ; to shut 
himself up in a little close garden and to grow 
curious flowers which may please a small number 



A LANGUAGE OF PAINTING 241 

of specially cultivated people. That has un- 
fortunately happened over and over again, 
and even in the case of Rossetti himself. Burne- 
Jones is not altogether free from it. 

At first he painted in the early style of Ros- 
setti, representing scenes as if they took place 
in actual life, somewhat like the work of the 
pre-Raphaelites, but not pledged quite so much 
to fact. Later he adopted a purely unreal 
treatment. He did not desire that his audience 
should compare his pictures with nature or 
with pictures representing nature, so that 
those people — and there are a great many — 
who say that his work is unnatural and unreal 
are so far quite right, but they should not 
expect in his pictures what he did not intend 
them to convey. 

To express himself, he had to discover a lan- 
guage, a language of painting fitted to his 
particular service. Few of his contemporaries 
were engaged upon that kind of work — none 
almost. To the ancient painters he had to 
appeal for help. For those ancient painters 
worked upon conventional lines which had been 
developed after long effort to express ideas in 
the most beautiful and spiritually truthful way. 

L.F.M. R 



242 SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 

They were not realists. As illustrative of what 
I mean, a very early crucifix enters into painful 
details, streaming blood and gaping wounds. 
But in the later crucifix that sort of realism 
disappears, at least in Italy, and we get the 
crucifix as a beautiful symbol free of all agony. 
The spiritual idea has taken the place of the 
physical suffering. 

His visits to Italy were, therefore, of the 
utmost importance to him. The first was in 
1859, when he was twenty-seven years of 
age. Two years later another. Then over ten 
years intervened and he paid another visit, 
and his last a year later in his fortieth year. 
Four visits in all. He saw the chief cities 
north of Rome and they had a profound 
influence upon him, corroborating all he felt 
and all he believed in. 

The painters who influenced him most were, 
I think : Sandro Botticelli, Mantegna, Giotto, 
Carpaccio, Era Angelico and Michael Angelo. 
He assimilated something from each of them, 
and from many others. Biit it will be found 
that they were all before the art of painting 
gained its greatest power of expressing real- 
ity. 



t 



" COPHETUA " 243 

Modern painters, with the exception of the 
pre-RaphaeHtes, were uninteresting to him. 
Turner, that great master of paint and Hght 
and atmosphere, was nothing to him or to 
WilHam Morris — in spite of Ruskin's champion- 
ing of him. They both saw through mediaeval 
spectacles. 

Let us try if we can apply to one of his own 
pictures his desire that we should be able to 
" read a picture as we do a poem." 

Take Cophetua and the Beggar Maid. 

This is the old story of the charm of lowly 
beauty subduing the great. 

Look at her sitting up there — alert — not 
quite at ease. Look at her far-off expression, 
as if she beheld some vision of liberty and joy 
perhaps about to vanish from her life, or felt 
some wonder come upon her. What if all the 
splendours of the palace meant a prison ! What 
if they took from her the joy in the singing of 
birds, in the sheep up the mountain-side, the sun- 
rise and the sunset, and all the simple pleasures 
of the peasant's life ! 

Perhaps those youths standing up behind 
the throne are chanting some love-song laden 
with power to ensnare her heart. 



244 SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 

He sits — in silent adoration — as if afraid to 
wreck her vision by word or deed, seeing in her 
a guileless human soul. See how he sits below 
her, and with side-glance watches, lest he 
should even by the turn of his head, disturb 
her reverie, lest he should force the life he 
would have her lead with him upon her, with- 
out due thought and her soul's full consent. 

And what an old world wonder of a place it 
is ! What strange and mystery-haunted images 
are wrought upon that throne ! 

Through the opening at the top are seen the 
battlements and the distant solemn tree-tops, 
and one band of quiet cloud, giving a feeling 
of profound repose. 

Note that she is barefooted, with a girdle of 
sheep's wool, is slightly clad, but not with rags. 
The painter does not want us to pity the ragged 
beggar, but to love the simple soul. He never 
painted rags. 

Let us take another picture. The Star of 
Bethlehem — which is in the Art Gallery here, 
and which was originally designed for William 
Morris to reproduce in tapestry. 

The scene represents the visit of the wise 
men to the Holy Mother and Child. How far 



"THE STAR OF BETHLEHEM" 245 

this is from the actual or probable ! He felt 
that the subject was of eternal interest. No 
nation, no time was of importance ; and indeed 
who, reading the New Testament story, sees 
it all happening in the East ? This is the Divine 
Mother and that the Divine Child for all time. 
Those wise men — three kings — are presenting 
their crowns to the Child. And note they repre- 
sent the three races of man. The Eastern, the 
European and the African. The star is not 
an astronomical one, but is a ball of light borne 
by an angel, which, I think, is an original in- 
vention by the painter. The Mother has that 
strange look of resignation to a state of exalta- 
tion bewildering to her understanding, which 
some of the ancient painters, especially Sandro 
Botticelli, gave to the Blessed Virgin. The 
place is not in a town, but out by a lonely wood- 
side ; the shed, a canopy of straw, but roses 
are about them and beneath their feet flowers. 
The shed is the treatment of it used by many 
of the ancient painters. 

The general colour of this picture is of a 
moonlight grey, showing very little more than 
would be seen in moonlight. 

The greatest judgment and invention is 



246 SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 

shown in the ornaments, the crown on the 
ground being most beautiful, all evincing 
deep sympathy with the craftsmanship of the 
early centuries. The angel here, as in his Annun- 
ciation, is designed under the influence of the 
figures in the porch of Chartres Cathedral. 

These two pictures can be read somewhat, 
and are full of meaning. 

Take another. The Golden Stairs. WTiat 
does it mean ? We might as well ask what 
does a piece of music mean. It is simply a 
delightfully bewitching snare to catch the fancy, 
an artist's expression of beautiful lines and 
contrasts in a mysterious nowhere. Tested 
by actuality: what of the dangerous stairs? 
where is this crowd of listless maidens coming 
from ? or where are they going to ? It may be 
a bit of the far-off land of peace and ease, eternal 
youth and music which we dream of in contrast 
to the strenuous life which we are doomed to 
at present. 

Now, although I have made an attempt to 
explain or analyse these pictures, it must never 
be forgotten that it is quite impossible to 
express in words what a good picture conveys 



COLOUR 247 

to the mind. There is so much in the way 
it is done — so much in unspeakable deHcacies, 
which can only be seen by the searching eye, 
and felt by our most sympathetic nerves. A 
really good picture needs no name. Its subject 
may be obvious or it may not. You stand 
in front of it and look — only look — but you 
take away more from it than you are con- 
scious of. If it is beautiful, and earnest, and 
true, the ideal in the centre of your soul 
has had its proper food, and the far-off hopes 
of man are brought nearer by your uplifting. 

" Colour," which to the average mind only 
means a pleasant arrangement of hues, may be 
far more than that ; just as music may be far 
more than an agreeable arrangement of sounds. 
The average artist arranges colour to please the 
eye only. But artists of the magnitude of Burne- 
Jones have a wider range of meaning in colour. 

We find in him three phases of colour — the 
first giving the feeling of the chasteness of a 
spring day, when the thought is religious ; the 
second like the mellow richness of the autumn, 
when the senses are appealed to ; the third 
somewhat like the grey of twilight, when the 
thought is solemn. 



248 SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 

These phases he used to create the mental 
atmosphere he desired in his audience. 

As a portrait painter he painted into his 
people his own fancy rather than what could 
be said to represent them. They are conse- 
quently more representative of his own mind 
than of his sitters. He feared to paint the 
natural complexion of the face — made them 
mostly pale. This he did in obedience to his 
dislike to realism. 

I have now dealt briefly with his pictures, 
but there is besides a vast region of work touch- 
ing the lesser crafts. Of these, stained glass 
windows come next to his pictures in import- 
ance. Birmingham is the proud possessor of 
four of the finest in the Cathedral Church of 
St. Philip. 

No man ever had greater powers of graceful 
arrangement of forms, and if one asks for 
melody in line only, he gives that perfectly. 
He had the power to make things " sing," as 
he was in the habit of calling it. In fact, he 
could design too easily, and his work has a 
tendency to over-sweetness in consequence. 

His appeal is, on the whole, to the cultured 



ROYAL ACADEMY 249 

more than to the mass of people. And I cannot 
help thinking that if his education had been 
less literary he would have produced work 
which would have touched a wider audience. 

People who are familiar with his serious work 
only, do not suspect the strong vein of fun 
which was in him. Those who were near him 
saw it constantly, and it now is to be seen in 
the many humorous drawings he made. 

It is an everlasting pity and shame that he 
was not employed to decorate the walls of 
some fine building — a thing he would have 
loved to do. What it would be to have a great 
hall covered with the legends of King Arthur 
by him — and another of the " Book of Job," 
by Wilham Blake ! 

Manchester has had the wisdom to have its 
Town Hall decorated by Madox Brown, and 
many will be the pilgrims to that city to see 
those pictures. 

He was elected an Associate of the Royal 
Academy in his fifty-second year, although he 
never sent a picture to its exhibition until after 
that. He resigned that associateship after three 
years, as it had not been followed by the full 
membership. 



250 SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES 

He was created a baronet on the recom- 
mendation of Mr. Gladstone in January, 1894. 

He died suddenly in June, 1898. 

Since I completed this lecture I found the 
following letter in Mr. Comyns Carr's recently 
published book. Some Eminent Victorians. It 
is a reply by Burne-Jones to a letter from 
Mr. Comyns Carr asking for information about 
certain pictures he had chosen for notice in 
his " Ignotus " articles which he was about 
to republish. It is a piece of self-criticism of 
great interest, when it is remembered that 
the writer was by no means a disappointed 
artist, or one who had not an abundance of 
admirers. 

I need not say that such a flattering review of them 
gave me pleasure, for whatever cause I have to see them 
with disappointment, such sjonpathy as you express 
cannot be anything but most welcome. But there is so 
little to say of the kind of information you ask for, and 
I should like to say nothing, for a sudden feeUng of being 
ridiculous ovenvhelms me. At Oxford till twenty-three, 
therefore no right to begin art at all, never having learnt 
one bit about it practically, nor till that time having seen 
any ancient picture at all to my remembrance. Pro- 
vincial life at home, at Oxford prints of Chalons and 
Landseer — you know them all. I think Morris's friend- 
ship began everything for me, everything that I afterwards 
cared for. When I left Oxford I got to know Rossetti, 
whose friendship I sought and obtained. He taught me 



SELF-CRITICISM 251 

practically all I ever learned ; afterwards I made a method 
for myself to suit my nature. He gave me courage to 
commit myself to imagination without shame, a thing 
both good and bad for me. It was Watts much later who 
compelled me to try and draw better. I quarrel with 
Morris about Art. He journeys to Iceland and I to Italy, 
which is a symbol. And I quarrel too with Rossetti. 
If I could travel backwards, I think my heart's desire 
would take me to Florence in the time of Botticelli. I 
do feel out of time and place, and then you should let me 
go crumbling and mouldering on, for I am not fit for 
anything else but a museum. You see I am writing in 
front of my work and ought to know, and I do know. 



R. W. DALE 

Born December ist, 1829. Died March 13th, 1895. 

By Charles Silvester Horne 

While I appreciate highly my privilege this 
evening in being permitted to speak on such 
a theme to such an audience, I shall have to 
crave your indulgence because of the special 
difficulty of my task. It is, in the first place, 
impossible for me to assume an attitude of 
detached criticism as one might try to do in 
estimating the work, and the life, of some man 
of distinction whom one had never known. I 
knew and loved Dr. Dale. Stories of his college 
friendship were a golden tradition in the home 
in the Midlands where I was brought up. I 
surrendered to the spirit of hero-worship for 
Dale of Birmingham before I first experienced 
the bracing influence of his personality, or 
sat spellbound beneath his eloquence. I frankly 
confess myself incapable of even an approxima- 
tion to impartiality in discussing either the 

253 



254 R- W. DALE 

creed or the public service of one who did more 
than any other teacher and leader of my genera- 
tion to shape the ideals and determine the 
life work of the younger ministers. But the 
second difficulty which I feel is that though I 
have so vivid and grateful a memory of him, 
I cannot speak to you as an old Birmingham 
friend and associate would have been able to 
do — some colleague of his through those strenu- 
ous and memorable years when the architects 
and builders of municipal Birmingham were 
not only adding fresh fame to this city, but 
inaugurating a new era of civic and social 
progress. So far as intimate personal famil- 
iarity with the local details of that historic 
struggle is the qualification for any appreciation 
of Dr. Dale and his work, I am disqualified, 
and can only claim the secondary qualification 
of genuine enthusiasm for those ideals which 
Birmingham contributed to our national life. 
Disabled therefore for the part of critic by 
reason at once of too sacred memories and too 
imperfect knowledge, you will forgive me if I 
play the more congenial role of eulogist, and 
if this lecture takes the form of the tribute 
of a disciple to a dead but ever-dear master. 



LONDON AND BIRMINGHAM 255 

There need be no quarrel between Birmingham 
and London as to the credit for the two famous 
citizens Mr. Chamberlain and Dr. Dale. It 
is, of course, open to London to suggest that 
Birmingham had to come to the metropolis 
for the men of genius which she could not 
produce herself. It is equally open to Birming- 
ham to retort that these two men gave early 
proof of sagacity by leaving London and coming 
to the only city capable of doing them justice. 
London may avow herself so rich in talent that 
she can supply citizens and statesmen for the 
rest of the kingdom ; Birmingham may reflect 
that despite changes in her fiscal theories she 
has no objection to the free importation of good 
raw material. The quality of the raw material 
is, of course, an all-important thing ; but even 
the best may be of little value if you do not 
know what to make of it when you have got it. 
It is enough to say that so far as Dr. Dale was 
concerned he was Dale of Birmingham the 
world over. Nearly forty years' association 
with this city would have sufficed to strengthen 
any languid hands and confirm any feeble 
knees that might have been a lamentable 
legacy from London. London, truth to tell, 



256 R. W. DALE 

was associated with the mortification of his 
early ambitions, Birmingham with the reahza- 
tion of them. A great name in London in the 
forties was Dr. John Campbell, minister of 
Whitefield's Tabernacle, Moorfields, where the 
Dales attended. He was as grim an old cham- 
pion of an intolerant orthodoxy as ever roasted 
a heretic, and with that note of papal infalli- 
bility which has not been wanting in very 
extreme Protestants in all ages. Dictatorial 
and domineering, he was incapable of any effort 
of the imagination so daring and dazzling as 
the conception that in the young lad of a poor 
home there might have arisen a greater than 
the Solomon of the Moorfields' Tabernacle. 
It was Dr. Campbell who put his foot down 
with every appearance of finality on the ambi- 
tion of the young man and his parents, and 
refused a recommendation to one of the colleges 
where he might have been trained for the 
ministry. From which it appears that even 
the decrees of Nonconformist Vaticans are not 
always infallible wisdom, any more than those 
of a more pretentious establishment else- 
where. 
But if London was thus associated with a 



THE BIRTH OF FAITH 257 

keen disappointment, it is only fair to point 
out that there is another and nobler association 
to be chronicled. Difficult as it is to treat the 
sacredest of all subjects in a public lecture, any 
incident that uncovers the secret springs of 
the inner life of such a man as Dr. Dale must 
detain us for a moment. For we may as well 
set it forth once for all that, great and famous 
as he subsequently became in the civic and 
political, the educational and ecclesiastical 
worlds, these were not the worlds in which he 
most of all lived and moved and had his being. 
The most original fact about Dr. Dale was 
undoubtedly his religious faith. He himself 
would never at any time have hesitated 
to trace his public activities to certain 
religious convictions, which again were the 
product of certain spiritual experiences. Mr. 
Lecky has told us in his history how a humble 
meeting in Aldersgate Street, at which John 
Wesley experienced the spiritual change that 
profoundly affected his life, " marks an epoch 
in English history." It is worth your while 
to reflect how much of the municipal and educa- 
tional history of this city is intimately connected 
with the preaching of a sermon by the Rev. 

L.F.M. s 



258 R. W. DALE 

James Sherman, the immediate result of which 
was that Robert WilHam Dale, as I heard him 
tell the story, left the chapel as in a dream, 
aware that something had happened which had 
affected his life at the centre. Such spiritual 
crises, where they are real and profound, mean 
the quickening of the whole being ; and great 
national and ecclesiastical movements, like 
mighty rivers, can, not infrequently, be traced 
to some simple source in the birth of a new man- 
hood beneath a creative influence which is at 
once the most mysterious and the most efficient 
of all the forces that make or mar our lives. 

It is sixty years ago since Dr. Dale entered 
as a student at Spring Hill College in this city 
to prepare himself for the Congregational 
ministry. Dr. J. B. Paton of Nottingham is 
almost the only survivor of the brilliant band 
of men who won no little reputation in the land 
for what was then relatively a small theological 
seminary. It is not, however, numbers that 
make a school or a college great, but primarily 
personality in the teachers ; and Spring Hill 
College was associated with one professor of 
genius. I mean, of course, Henry Rogers, an-j 
other name of which Birmingham may be justb 



HENRY ROGERS 259 

proud, the friend and literary colleague of 
Macaulay, Stephen, Whateley and others. He 
was a philosopher and student of history, a 
brilliant essayist, a keen and subtle thinker, a wit, 
an inspiring conversationalist, and through all 
and above all a kindly and devout Christian 
gentleman. It can hardly be doubted, I think, 
that among the earliest of the formative influ- 
ences of Dr. Dale's life this one ranked highest. 
Henry Rogers was in the best sense of the word 
a man of the world, deeply interested in, and 
interesting his students in every living move- 
ment of thought and action. We have often 
had reason to complain of the narrowing and 
even monastic effect of life in a seminary, and 
nothing could have been healthier by way of 
abatement of any such tendency than personal 
contact with one whose tastes and ideas were 
so cosmopolitan, and who regarded it as belong- 
ing to the function of a college professor not to 
discourage but to compel original thought on 
the part of his men. We can imagine how 
congenial such a personality would be to a 
young man of Dale's temperament. The semin- 
ary has yet to be built that could have made 
a monk of him. For the ascetic spirit he had 



26o R. W. DALE 

less than no respect. He had no ambition to 
play the part of the small coasting vessel, skirt- 
ing timidly about among the shallows and 
sheltered places, and exploring the petty creeks 
and estuaries of thought. He was built for 
the high seas. He was happy in the great 
waters. He moved, as only great minds can, 
with a superb ease and power, where men of 
smaller build are timid and vacillating. He was, 
as we all know so well, a man of massive and 
masculine intellect, and John Bright' s old say- 
ing about him, that he suggested the Church 
militant was emphatically true. It was never 
his way to evade discussion and controversy. 
He had a soldier's instinct for the storm-centre, 
and the " happy warrior's " joy in battle. 
What distinguished his fighting was not the 
smart and supple use of the rapier, but the 
tremendous sweep of the broadsword, as of 
some knight of heroic mould and giant stature 
bearing down all before him in the thickest of 
the fray. One consequence of this was that 
he was never afraid of theology, nor, let me 
add, of theological controversy. Whether con- 
troversy is noble or ignoble depends absolutely 
on the spirit of the controversialists. He had 



DALE AND DAWSON 261 

no sympathy with a tame and weak surrender 
where great truths were at stake simply because, 
as is sometimes argued, good and pious people 
differ, and therefore it is best to leave the sub- 
ject alone. He was drawn by sheer intellectual 
and spiritual interest to the discussion of the 
biggest and most momentous problems of life 
and religion, and believed that the Church of 
Christ in England would suffer irreparable loss 
if she did not face the problems of theology 
with as firm and inflexible an intellectual cour- 
age as the leaders of science or philosophy 
have dedicated to the problems on which 
they have spent their strength. 

I have been led to say so much on this point 
not only because it explains why at this forma- 
tive period a leader of thought like Henry 
Rogers would be invaluable to him, but because 
it also explains why another famous Birming- 
ham teacher, who inspired some of his most 
characteristic ideals, could yet never wholly 
satisfy him. In that biography of Dr. Dale, 
by his son, which is in the way of becoming a 
Nonconformist classic, the author recognizes fully 
the influence of George Dawson in strengthening 
convictions in. Dale which afterwards bore fruit 



262 R. W. DALE 

in the masterly books which he devoted to the 
exposition of Christian ethics. There is no 
reference in that biography to the very interest- 
ing appreciation by John Ruskin, in the 87/A 
Fors, of an article on George Dawson contri- 
buted by Dale to the Nineteenth Century, and 
which is an admirable indication of the writer's 
standpoint. There are two passages in it at 
once critical of and appreciative of George 
Dawson, which Mr. Ruskin commended so 
absolutely that he announced his intention 
to place them " for an abiding comfort and 
power in St. George's Schools." Suffer me to 
read to you these two passages that were so 
fortunate as to win the unqualified favour of that 
fastidious and somewhat capricious critic. The 
first is this — " To despise the creeds in which 
the noblest intellects of Christendom in times 
past found rest is presumptuous folly ; to sup- 
pose that these creeds are a final and exact 
statement of all that the Church can ever know 
is to forget that in every creed there are two 
elements — the divine substance and the human 
form. The form must change with the changing 
thoughts of man, and even the substance may 
come to shine with clearer liglit and to reveal 



RUSKIN ON DALE 263 

unsuspected glories as God and man come 
nearer together." 

In that saying there stand expressed his 
convictions very early formed: (i) that the form 
of the Christian creed must necessarily change 
with the changing times ; and (2) that any 
new form must enshrine the very substance of 
the great faith " in which the noblest intellects 
of Christendom found rest." 

Now let us read together this other " most 
important and noble passage," as Mr. Ruskin 
calls it. George Dawson, Dale has contended, 
cast anchor in the belief that '' the facts of the 
universe are steadfast and not to be changed 
by human fancies or follies." Then follows 
Dale's addition : " The spiritual universe is 
no more to be made out of a man's head than 
the material or the moral universe. There, 
too, the conditions of human life are fixed. 
There, too, we have to respect the facts ; and 
whether we respect them or not the facts 
remain. There, too, we have to confess the 
authority of the actual laws ; and whether 
we confess it or not we shall suffer for breaking 
them. To suppose that in relation to the 
spiritual universe it is safe or right to believe 



264 R. W. DALE 

what we think it pleasant to believe — to suppose 
that because we think it is eminently desirable 
that the spiritual universe should be ordered 
in a particular way, therefore we are at liberty 
to act as though this were certainly the way in 
which it is ordered, and that though we happen 
to be wrong it will make no difference — is pre- 
posterous. No ; water drowns, fire burns, 
whether we believe it or not. No belief of ours 
will change the facts, or reverse the laws of the 
spiritual universe. It is our first business to 
discover the laws, and to learn how the facts 
stand." 

Such were the passages that captured John 
Ruskin's admiration, and how familiar to some 
of us the words sound ! How we seem to 
hear again the voice of one who scorned to 
claim any quarter, or ask any favours, for the 
system of thought which was to him the very 
queen of sciences ! What granite common- 
sense revealed itself as the foundation of every 
fabric of philosophy or theology that we owe 
to him ! How he insisted on the facts, the 
proven facts — but all the facts — so that scientific 
observation, analysis and co-ordination of actual 
experiences might lead up to sound theory and 



I 



INTELLECT IN PREACHING 265 

rational belief. Those who frankly recognize 
this necessity may nevertheless arrive at totally 
different conclusions, but they will respect one 
another, for they are at least agreed on the 
only method that can help us in the search for 
truth. 

Some of you may feel a little impatient 
that I should spend so much time on this aspect 
of Dr. Dale's character. But the fact is that 
unless we understand this, the perspective will 
be all wrong. When he settled at Carr's Lane 
he did not propose to serve up to his con- 
gregations merely dainty and highly-spiced 
confectionery, but strong meat such as would 
produce a robust type of Christian citizen. The 
sermons that consist of anecdotes, platitudes, 
and a quotation from Longfellow were not his 
style. The prophecy has become famous of 
the Congregational minister who told him that 
the congregation at Carr's Lane would never 
stand doctrinal preaching. " They will have 
to stand it " was the reply. One of his most 
highly educated hearers complained that it 
was " hard work " to follow his sermons on the 
Romans. Hard work, no doubt, it was, but 
the people of Birmingham soon discovered 



266 R. W. DALE 

that it was worth while to work hard at the 
highest of all themes under his guidance. I 
remember very well his saying to me that the 
skilled artisan of Birmingham was the best 
hearer he had ever found ; one who would 
take and appreciate the strongest thinking 
that could be offered him. He respected his 
audience, and his audience came to respect 
him. I will not weary you with the narrative 
of the early years of this momentous and historic 
ministry in Birmingham, when those who could 
not recognize old truth unless it took the form 
of old shibboleth bemoaned to one another the 
young man's heretical tendencies, and shook 
their heads over his probable eventual destiny. 
Nor have I time for more than a sentence of 
recognition of the chivalrous and courageous 
attitude assumed towards him by his grand 
old colleague, the veteran John Angell James, 
who differed often and radically from the 
younger man's doctrines but defended him 
with magnificent staunchness, knowing full 
well his essential loyalty to the evangelic faith. 
All this is known to you — is it not written in 
the Book of the Chronicles of the dissenting 
divines of England ? 



HIS IDEAL OF THE MINISTRY 267 

This, then, was the new force that was to 
be brought to bear upon local and national 
politics in the mid-years of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. You and I are so familiar to-day with 
the position that it is the duty of every true 
minister and every true Church to be interested 
in all aspects of human life collective as well 
as individual, that we hardly reahze that when 
a young Congregational minister in those days 
began not only to preach this thing but actually 
to practise what he preached, every saint over 
fifty was apt to regard it as a deplorable and 
disastrous innovation. Dale was nothing if 
not drastic and thorough in the application of 
his principles. He found no warrant in the 
earliest charter of the Church for the distinction 
between priest and people. He believed that 
all Christians were priests, and he objected to 
be regarded as a member of a sacred caste, and 
marked out by certain disabilities as a distinct 
order of human being. He held that a man 
forfeits no privilege and abdicates no duty in 
becoming a minister of a church. He may not, 
on that account, repudiate his citizen obhgation. 
He may not separate himself, by artificial 
distinctions, from the rest of the common- 



268 R. M'. DALE 

wealth. So, with admirable directness, Dale 
put his principles into practice. He forswore 
the white tie and the ministerial costume. He 
deliberately and definitely broke down every 
monastic habit and custom that had clung to 
the Puritan minister in spite of his puritanism. 
The Genevan gown went the way of the white 
stock. Despite the well-meant protest that 
they invested ministers with an air of levity 
and worldliness, he grew a beard and a mous- 
tache. He took care to have it known that 
he had an invincible objection to the title 
' ' Reverend. ' ' He made no secret of the fact that 
he smoked a pipe. The souls of some of the 
faithful froze with horror at these iconoclastic 
methods. But he was undismayed. Yet it 
is worth while to observe that he fought his 
battle out in his own community at Carr's 
Lane, before he ventured forth into the wider 
arena. He fought and he won. The plain 
men and women of Birmingham understood 
him ; and Nonconformity soon recognized that 
it had nothing to lose but everything to gain 
by getting rid of some outworn trappings which 
disguised rather than expressed its true soul 
and meaning. When Dale proceeded to carry 



SOCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL INTEREST 269 

out his principles still more freely, and made 
full public proof of his citizenship, he had 
secured the co-operation of his Church, he had 
conquered their prejudices, and he went forth 
into wider service followed by the conviction 
and enthusiasm of a united people who had 
responded with magnificent unanimity to the 
new ideals of life which he had advocated and 
exemplified in their midst. 

The old prejudice which Dale was bent on 
breaking down was, in a word, that a minister 
existed for a limited number of Church members 
and pew-holders, and not for the whole popula- 
tion of a city. His responsibility to God and 
the Church was for the right discharge of his 
mission to Birmingham, and to the greater 
world outside. He was, as you all know, an 
ardent denominationalist, but he never dreamed, 
to use a modern phrase, of contracting himself 
out of the national system to serve denomina- 
tionalism more efficiently. He began with a 
close first-hand investigation of the conditions 
of business and industrial life in Birmingham. 
He studied the factory, the shop, the office. 
He interested himself in all the facts of work 
and wages. " The last translation of the 



270 R. W. DALE 

Bible," he once said, "will be its translation into 
the vernacular of daily conduct and custom." 
Many was the young man afterwards who was 
amazed to find that Dale knew more about the 
inner workings of the business in which he was 
engaged than he knew himself. Readers of 
his Week-day Sermons, and the Laws of Christ 
for Common Life, will realize how intimate was 
his knowledge of the everyday affairs of the 
working world. From these wide interests he 
advanced with sure and steady tread to a close 
examination of the more public questions — 
questions which equally involved ethical con- 
siderations, and to the solution of which prin- 
ciples of national righteousness must be applied. 
Into that world of politics he was constrained 
to enter by the ideal that he had formed of what 
the Christian ministry ought to be. He could 
not admit that in the public affairs of a city 
alone conscience and reason and the humaner 
instincts had nothing to say. But not only 
was he prepared to enter this world himself — a 
world that had often been treated as common 
and unclean by professing Christian people — 
but he was determined that the members of 
this Church should be confronted with their 



THE TRUE VIEW OF POLITICS 271 

responsibility in this respect. He once said, 
in his lectures on preaching, that he believed 
the day would come when those who refused to 
vote would be subjected to Church disciphne 
as well as people who refused to pay their debts. 
And the saying exactly expressed what he felt ; 
for every citizen owes a debt to his city, and 
if he does not pay his debt, he defrauds the 
city of its due. That was, as you well know, 
a characteristic article of his creed ; and with 
what wealth of illustration and argument he 
expounded it from pulpit and platform as well 
as in the press and in the polling-booth itself 
all England may bear witness. Speaking in 
your Town Hall on one occasion when Mr. 
Bright was present he devoted himself to this 
theme. " Of all secular affairs," he said, " poli- 
tics rightly considered are among the most un- 
worldly, inasmuch as the man who is devoted 
to political life ought to be seeking no personal 
or private good. The true political spirit is 
the mind that was in Christ Jesus, who ' looked 
not on His own things but also on the things 
of others.' " "I feel," he went on, *' a grave and 
solemn conviction which deepens year by year 
that in a country like this, where the public 



272 R. W. DALE 

business of the State is the private duty of 
every citizen, those who decHne to use their 
pohtical power are guilty of treachery both to 
God and man." Nobody felt more keenly than 
he that the effect of this " treachery " on the 
part of religious people is to jeopardize the best 
interests of the commonwealth by leaving them 
to those who have private axes to grind. It is 
easy to condemn corruption in these latter, but 
the former deserved, in Dale's thought, an equal 
share of condemnation. " The rogues do public 
work in order to make money ; the honest men 
neglect public work in order to save money 
Judged by the laws of public morality there is 
not much to choose between them." That is 
plain talking, but such talk was needed in the 
mid- Victorian days if our Churches were to be 
saved from what Dr. Dale truly called " an 
exquisitely delicate and valetudinarian spirit- 
uality." 

That they were effectually saved from that 
weak and futile attitude was due mainly, I think, 
to him. Through all his preaching and speak- 
ing one hears this strong dominant note. He 
was Christ's servant for the sake of the Church, 
the city, the commonwealth, the world. Eng- 



HIS LOVE FOR BIRMINGHAM 273 

land has never had a more perfect example of a 
man of whom it could be said that every prac- 
tical activity rooted itself in a spiritual principle. 
Dearly as he loved Carr's Lane, and dearly as 
the Church at Carr's Lane loved him, he could 
not and would not narrow his affections, nor 
consent to circumscribe the area of his activities. 
He faced the logical consequence of his own 
creed. He was bent on making Birmingham 
a very metropolis of liberty, education, and 
courageous municipal government. The city, 
its possibilities and opportunities, possessed 
his imagination, and captured his devotion. 
The human interest was paramount with him. 
He was never insensitive to the appeal of sub- 
lime and beautiful scenery. He appreciated 
the quiet resting-places of life as much as any- 
body. But it was in the crowded streets, with 
the men and women fighting hard beneath the 
battle-smoke, that his heart was ; and he could 
never be long separated from them. The pas- 
sage in one of his letters is inevitable in a lecture 
like this — " At this moment," he writes during a 
summer holiday, " when I raise my eyes, the 
Lake of Lucerne with its guardian mountains 
is before me — the noblest scenery as some think 

L.F.M. T 



274 R. W. DALE 

in all Europe ; but I declare that there is no- 
thing in this magnificent view which makes me 
feel half the thrill I have sometimes felt when 
I have looked down on the smoky streets of 
Birmingham from the railway as I have returned 
to my work among you after a holiday. The 
thought of having to do more or less directly 
with all that mass of human thought and action 
which is covered with the ceaseless smoke which 
hangs over us — the thought that you and I 
together may, with God's help, save multitudes 
— sends the blood through one's veins with an 
exultation and glow which the most magnificent 
aspects of the material universe cannot create." 
The spirit in which he entered upon his strenu- 
ous and often stormy political and municipal 
life may be best illustrated by two stories 
gathered from different sections of his son's 
biography. The first refers to the unveiling of 
a monument to Joseph Sturge, and George 
Dawson's perverse and undiscerning remark 
that Joseph Sturge '' was a singularly un- 
practical man." Dale was roused. " The most 
practical thing in the world," he replied, " is 
to believe in God's law, and to try to hold fast 
to it." That, as his biographer says, was a 



SOCIAL REFORM 275 

summary of his whole Hfe and philosophy. He 
was in politics because it was God's law for him ; 
and he could not stay outside without breaking 
that law. The other story is of a retort which 
he made, in a little private gathering, to Mr. 
O'Sullivan, an educational antagonist. *' Dale," 
said O' Sullivan, '' when do you mean to quit 
politics and look after your soul ? " The reply 
was as decisive as the question was pointed. '' I 
have given my soul to Christ to look after ; He 
can do it better than I can ; my duty is to do 
His will, and to leave the rest with Him." About 
that " will," so far as the immediate content 
was concerned, he was troubled with few doubts. 
He would tell the story of Alderman White's 
public stewardship — the teacher of a large Bible 
Class for young men ; how he visited every 
street, every court in his ward ; how he set 
forth the facts as to the squalid homes in which 
the poor lived, destructive to health and ren- 
dering all high moral Christian life almost im- 
possible ; how he then submitted to the Council 
an elaborate scheme for sweeping all the wretched 
district away at a cost of four and a half millions, 
a proposal which the Council unanimously 
accepted. " Now I believe," said Dale, " that 



276 R. W. DALE 

my friend was ttying to get the will of God done 
on earth as it is in heaven, just as much when 
he was fighting St. Mary's ward, and speaking 
in the Council as when he was teaching his Bible 
Class on Sunday morning." It is no exaggera- 
tion to say that the eyes of the nation were on 
Birmingham, where a new civic spirit was created 
largely by the inspiring Gospel of Christian 
citizenship preached pre-eminently by Dale, 
Dawson, and Vince ; and illustrated in the 
City life by such lay-comrades as Mr. Chamber- 
lain, Mr. Dixon, Mr. J. S. Wright and many 
others. Then it was proved that even the plat- 
form of municipal politics might be converted 
into a pulpit from which might be published a 
new evangel. Ideals were no longer despised. 
Men of vision were not thereby disqualified 
for public affairs. To quote Dr. Dale's own 
description, " the speakers dwelt with glowing 
enthusiasm on what a great and prosperous 
town like Birmingham might do for its people. 
They spoke of sweeping away streets in which 
it was not possible to live a healthy and decent 
life ; of making the town cleaner, sweeter, 
brighter ; of providing gardens and parks and 
music ; of erecting baths and free libraries, an 



CIVIC IDEALS 277 

art gallery and a museum. They insisted that 
great monopolies like the gas and water supply 
should be in the hands of the Corporation ; that 
good water should be supplied without stint at 
the lowest possible prices ; that the profits of 
the gas-supply should relieve the pressure of 
the rates. Sometimes an adventurous oratoi 
would excite his audience by dwelling on the 
glories of Florence and of the other cities of 
Italy in the Middle Ages, and suggest that Birm- 
ingham too might become the home of a noble 
literature and art." I shrewdly suspect that 
he himself was that " adventurous orator." 

In that final sentence there lay a clue to 
another article of his creed with which his name 
and fame wiU always be associated. He did 
not enter either municipal or national politics 
simply to realize certain materialistic ends. 
Municipal baths and wash-houses, gas and water, 
clean streets and adequate drains, modern 
houses and improved locomotion, all belong 
to the necessaries rather than the luxuries 
of a democratic civilization. But a very large 
part of their value will always depend on the 
sort of men and women who are going to make 
use of them. While as for libraries, galleries, aiid 



278 R. W. DALE 

museums, it is mere waste of good money to 
provide these things unless you are also pre- 
pared to educate the people to enjoy them 
and benefit by them. 

We have arrived now at those stormy years 
around 1870 when the battle for national educa- 
tion was fought out, and as a result a limited and 
maimed national system did get on to its feet and 
hobble along. So far as the theory of com- 
pulsory universal education was concerned Dale 
was one of the pioneers, breaking a lance for it 
when few even of his closest denominational 
allies could be found to sympathize with him. 
Nobody saw clearer than he did that the old 
hard individualism was no sort of a theory to 
meet the necessities of our modern society. 
He realized that the broadening of the citizen- 
ship of the nation had made education more 
necessary than ever ; but he argued the case 
also from a modern point of view in the rights 
of the children, and the duty of the State to 
enforce that right. The State cannot permit 
physical starvation ; and no humane and 
advanced State can permit mental starvation 
either. To that position he had to convert 
the mass of Liberals and Nonconformists of 



STATE EDUCATION 279 

the old school who resented any interference 
with those people who regard it as a sacred 
parental privilege to be able to starve the minds 
and overwork the bodies of their children. It 
was not that the best minds in England were 
indifferent to the value of education, but that 
they thought it was one of those interests that 
might better be left to the haphazard voluntary 
system. Dale had done all that one man might 
to make voluntaryism effective ; he had pleaded 
for funds ; he had to complain that voluntary- 
ism to many people meant '' freedom to give 
nothing." He now saw clearly that there was 
no escape from universal compulsory education 
paid for out of State funds if England was not 
to be outstripped by other great competitive 
nations. With a conviction and enthusiasm 
that were irresistible he flung himself into the 
new fray ; he wrote masterly articles in the 
leading magazines ; he fought the matter out 
at private conferences ; he conquered the rank 
and file from the public platform. No single 
man did more than he to make national educa- 
tion an inevitable article of the Liberal creed ; 
a question which the great Liberal majority 
of 1868 dared not shirk even if they would. 



28o R. W. DALE 

I have not time to devote more than a sen- 
tence or two to the revolt which Dale eventually 
led against the famous 1870 Act of Mr. Forster, 
and the contempt for the essential principle of 
religious equality which, as Dale maintained, 
was manifest in that measure. That State 
grants without State control should be conceded 
to denominational schools was, as he argued 
then, a vicious and mischievous principle capable 
of indefinite expansion. He was equally 
offended at some of the provisions relative to 
the School Boards, an inadequate conscience 
clause, and the indefiniteness of the Cowper- 
Temple regulation for Bible teaching. He had 
a great horror of seeing the schools which should 
make for the unity and harmony of the common- 
wealth converted into places for emphasizing 
religious and denominational distinctions. 
Hence it was that he adopted the policy to 
which after fierce debate he secured the adhesion 
of the Congregational Union Committee, " that 
in any system of national education secular in- 
struction alone should be provided by the State, 
and that the care of religious instruction should 
be remitted to parents and churches." It may 
be added that the more subtle question as to 



THE NONCONFORMIST REVOLT 281 

the exact definition of secular education had 
not then arisen ; nor had the failure of an 
admirable attempt to prove the sufficiency of 
the " right of entry" in Birmingham shown 
conclusively that voluntar}/ Biblical instruction 
at all events is not a practical proposition. He 
always regarded it as a concession on his part 
when he subsequently consented that the Bible 
should be read in the schools without note or 
comment, and in later years he returned to the 
severely secular position which he defended 
with renewed energy upon his return from 
Australia, and after an investigation of the 
Australian school systems. At the moment, 
however, he felt that in the Act of 1870 with 
its state recognition of denominationalism, 
essential Liberalism had been betrayed and 
the principle of religious equality dishonoured. 
He led the revolt against Mr. Forster and Mr. 
Gladstone which did more than anything else 
to produce the reaction which brought Mr. 
Disraeli into power in 1874. It was no doubt 
a heavy price to pay for loyalty to a single 
principle. But the fact that Dale and thousands 
with him were content to pay it was the strongest 
proof that could be offered of the value they 



282 R. W. DALE 

set on education, and equal justice to all children 
in the schools of the nation ; and when one 
considers the endless sequence of ecclesiastical 
strife and political intrigue that has been the 
fatal fruit of the double-minded policy of 1870, 
he is indeed a bold critic who is prepared 
roundly to deny that if Liberalism had been led 
then, not by W. E. Forster but by R. W. Dale, 
we should have been spared many years of 
controversy inimical alike to education and to 
religion. Once, however, the 1870 Bill was 
law, he made up his mind that its worst 
perils must be obviated in administration. 
From 1870 to 1880 he was, as you all know, 
responsible, with distinguished colleagues, for 
the great constructive work which covered 
this city with Board Schools of which she is 
justly proud. If by force of circumstances he 
was compelled from time to time to fight 
vehemently in what seemed to be a negative 
crusade, his efforts during those years proved 
him to be predominantly a constructive states- 
man, and an educational enthusiast. Nobody 
rejoiced more than he did whenever he was 
able to suspend hostilities against ecclesiasticism 
and join his ability and energy to those of all 



A HIGH CHURCHMAN 283 

good citizens in perfecting the education of 
the children. 

There is only one other controversy into 
which we need follow him. It was the one in 
which his genius could not fail to mark him 
out for leadership, and it has the advantage 
that it leads us back in closing to what was 
most fundamental in his thinking. We have 
already seen what was his view of the Church. 
In the true sense of the word he was a great 
Churchman, and, as he never failed to claim, 
he was a High Churchman. He believed that 
Christian men and women, however simple 
and uncultured, might have the presence of 
Christ with them in their counsels ; and that 
because uhi Christus ihi ecclesia, "where 
Christ is there is a church," is eternally true, 
therefore they might receive direction from the 
Head of the Church and assume the respon- 
sible functions of a Church which Christ Him- 
self has inspired and guided. He argued 
that, such being the clear New Testament 
teaching, for it to be assumed that such a 
Church is not to be intrusted with the choice 
of a minister, or the management of its own 
worship and spiritual affairs, is to discredit 



284 R. W. DALE 

the reality of Christ's Headship and the suffi- 
ciency of His promise. He felt that for the 
State to dictate to Christ's Church within its 
borders who should be its chief pastors, what 
should be its creeds and rubrics and lectionary — 
in short for Parliament to be called in to de- 
fine the liberties and enforce the discipline of 
the Church of Christ was and is an intolerable 
and presumptuous usurpation. Such, as we 
have seen, was his view of the Church. 

We have seen also what was his view of the 
State ; how he identified himself with the 
school of thinkers who argued for an extension 
of the State's legitimate authority, and the 
enlargement of its functions ; but how, at the 
same time, when the problem of religious educa- 
tion arose he declined absolutely to admit the 
competence of the State to prescribe the religion 
suitable for its children, or to train the teachers 
capable of teaching it. No man holding by 
these principles as fundamental to all his 
thinking can possibly acquiesce in the existing 
relations of Church and State. In association 
with Mr. Bright and Mr. Chamberlain he made 
Birmingham the Mecca of the Liberation move- 
ment. I believe I should speak the literal 



THE TRIPLE ALLIANCE 285 

truth if I were to say that in all the political 
history of England there is no parallel to this 
triple alliance of orators each of whom was 
perfect in his own style and order, one star 
differing from another star in glory. Mr. Cham- 
berlain's unique gift of keen incisive logic, Mr. 
Bright's magnificent purple rhetoric, and Dale's 
aptitude for massive intellectual and ethical 
arguments were mutually complementary. If 
their Rome was ever attacked, the enemy 
might well hesitate to storm the bridge " where 
stood the dauntless three." John Bright's 
speeches on the disestablishment of the Irish 
Church are among the noblest in the language. 
Dale and Chamberlain fought the battle as 
vehemently in the Midlands as Bright fought 
it in Parliament ; and in contradistinction to 
Mr. Gladstone they never pretended that it 
was other than one apphcation of a principle 
that is essentially just and true, and that 
must eventually have recognition everywhere. 
This was the principle to the exposition of 
which, in association with Dr. Guinness Rogers, 
Dale gave his whole strength in the prime of his 
days 'in a campaign that became memorable. 
As his son has well said, he was concerned not 



286 R. W. DALE 

so much to right Nonconformity as to right 
Christianity, which he felt was misrepresented 
and perverted, disabled and discrowned, by the 
mere fact of Parliamentary control. 

It ought, I think, to be said that Dale's " Root 
and Branch " opinions on this great subject — for 
he was a sound disciple of John Milton — while 
in his early days in Birmingham they scandalized 
and alienated many whom he would have 
desired to have as allies, came in course of time 
to be thoroughly understood and appreciated, 
and his relations with such men as Bishop West- 
cott and Cardinal Newman were relations of 
mutual friendliness and respect. No one was 
ever more ready than he at all times to acknow- 
ledge the personal debt which he owed to the 
great Anglican and Roman Catholic communions. 
Nobody was better able to sympathize with them 
in their reverence for the Church idea. When 
Dr. Welldon once in Exeter Hall claimed him 
as a Churchman no one who saw him will forget 
the energetic nod of the head as he retorted, 
" There's no mistake about that." But what 
so many found it difficult to understand was 
that he was a Churchman because he was anti- 
clerical, and he claimed no authority in the 



HIS ELOQUENCE 287 

Church that did not equally belong to its hum- 
blest member. It was this combination, as I 
hold, of an intense jealousy for the rights and 
prerogatives of the Church, with the sturdy 
and uncompromising repudiation of the clerical 
claims, that made him a unique and original 
force in the Christian thought and life of his 
time. Possibly it will make his position clear 
if I quote a passage which at once illustrates 
his attitude, and is a fine example of his sonorous 
eloquence — an eloquence of an order and quality 
in which he had no living rival — an eloquence 
of the old stately style of which Burke, on 
whom he deliberately formed himself, was the 
supreme master, and of which, alas ! in these 
latter days, we have no representative left. 
It is not necessary that you should agree with the 
sentiment to be able to admire and to enjoy 
this example of impassioned polemic. 

I am not insensible to the majesty and grandeur of the 
Church of Rome. It has other and nobler claims on our 
wonder and admiration than those which rest upon the 
elaborate perfection of its organization, the vast number 
of its adherents, its venerable antiquity, and the great 
part which it has played in the history of Christendom. I 
have wept over the story of the heroism, the sufferings, 
the unquenchable ardour of its illustrious missionaries. 
The massive and stately structure of its theology, built up 



288 R. W. DALE 

by the gigantic labours and enormous learning of innumer- 
able doctors, through a long succession of generations, 
has filled me with intellectual awe. I have been melted, and 
I have been thrilled, by the transcendent eloquence of 
its great preachers, from Bossuet to Lacordaire. I know 
something of the wealth of spiritual wisdom to be found in 
the spiritual writings of its great mystics who, in the 
strength of an intense faith in the unseen, have been able 
to dissolve the spell of a sensuous worship, and to penetrate 
through an elaborate ceremonial into the immediate pres- 
ence of God. The saints who have been the strength and 
the glory of the Romish Church in days gone by have their 
successors in our own times, and God forbid that I should 
ever forget that those who love Christ, whatever their 
Church and whatever their creed, are regenerate of the 
Holy Ghost, and heirs together of God's eternal glory. But 
against the pretensions of this Church to be the exclusive 
minister of God's grace and to stand between even the 
humblest and obscurest of God's children and their hea- 
venly Father ; against the assumptions on which her priests 
and her bishops rest their claim to control national policy 
and legislation ; against the authority asserted on behalf 
of her chief ruler to interfere in the name of God with the 
free development of the intellectual, political, and social 
life of mankind ; against these I must declare my intense 
and implacable hostility. Never, never again, I trust, 
will the people of England and Scotland permit the emis- 
saries of an Italian bishop to menace their Parliaments 
and to control their kings. If we have to fight over again 
the old battle — the battle between the theology of Rome 
and the pure truth of Christ, between the pretensions of 
her priesthood and the liberty of immediate access to God 
which Christ confers on every one that receives His grace, 
I trust we shall have the sanctity and the learning and the 
genius to win a controversial triumph as illustrious as that 



HOME RULE 289 

which our fathers won. And if the battle is to be fought 
in another form — if the Roman Cathohc priesthood tell 
us that freedom is not enough for them, but that they 
must have privilege ; if they tell us that it is not enough 
that the Irish people have been emancipated from the 
injustice of having to support a Church whose faith, and 
whose worship they reject ; if they insist on having imperial 
grants, in larger and still larger proportions, voted for 
the maintenance of schools intended to propagate the 
Romish faith; and if they tell us that in the event of 
our refusing to concede their claims they will provoke 
civil disturbance and render British rule in Ireland im- 
possible ; I trust that those threats will but stir the heart 
and brace the courage of the English and Scottish people, 
and that we shall tell them that the high spirit of this 
ancient empire has not decayed, that we are resolved to 
pursue a policy of justice and of freedom, that we scorn 
their threats and defy their power, and may God defend 
the right ! 

My time has gone, and I can but ask your 
patience for a sentence or two by way of con- 
clusion. The political schism that cleft into 
two hostile camps those with whom he had been 
so closely associated, when the Home Rule 
question was raised in an acute form in 1886, 
caused him more distress than perhaps to any 
other prominent public man. He had hosts 
of friends among both parties to the dispute ; 
and he saw from the first how disastrous this 
fissure would be to many of the causes for which 
he cared most. Already he had sorely over- 

L.F.M. u 



290 R. W. DALE 

taxed his strength, and it may be doubted 
whether his visit to AustraHa, with its exacting 
programme of engagements, helped to mend 
matters. On his return to England he realized 
that his political work was done. It was " time 
to be old," and " to take in sail." To many 
men who had lived so much in the public eye 
this would have been almost an intolerable cross. 
But I have spoken indeed to little purpose 
if I have not made it apparent that his pre- 
dominant interest lay throughout in the world 
of idea and belief ; and that even more vital 
to the Commonwealth than the practical order- 
ing of its affairs was, in his estimation, the clear 
and sound exposition of the principles and mo- 
tives of action. To this work he consecrated 
his closing years. If any credence were still 
given to the old fallacy that much contact with 
public affairs unfits a man for religious and 
theological leadership, and that no one who 
rubs shoulders with politicians and adminis- 
trators of all sorts and conditions can retain 
unabated the interest and experience which 
combine to form the only true saintly character, 
then Dr. Dale would seem to have been speci- 
ally raised up to confute such theory. It 



THE CLOSING YEARS 291 

was not necessary to accept all his theological 
conclusions to admire his intellectual grasp, 
to envy his extraordinary power of cogent 
argument, and to sympathize with his lofty 
moral and spiritual ideals. The practical work- 
ing faith that had been his inspiration through 
strenuous and stormy years did not fail him 
now ; and as the weather-beaten vessel drew 
on toward the haven and into calmer waters, 
he had time for reflection, time to confirm 
and illustrate for others the fundamental laws 
and principles by which he had navigated these 
earthly seas. He had taken his bearings from 
the sun, and he had read direction in the stars ; 
and he was confident not only that they had 
not betrayed him, but that all human instru- 
ments and calculations would ever need to be 
tested and corrected, as the ages move on, by 
these eternal facts of our spiritual firmament 
If the last days were not without pain, they 
were at least without dread. To him Emer- 
son's magical lines might have been spoken : 

Lowly-faithful banish fear. 

Right onward drive unharmed ; 

The port, well worth the cruise, is near, 

And every wave is charmed. 



292 R. W. DALE 

Birmingham does well to be proud of its 
famous sons. Great men have been among 
you, hands that penned and tongues that uttered 
wisdom. No city is so rich in living leaders 
that it can afford to blot out of the book of its 
remembrance the apostles and prophets who 
laid the very foundations of its civic well-being. 
Few cities in the world have so good a right as 
this to draw up a calendar of saints and seers, 
men of wide vision, and noble disinterested 
activity. It has been well for you to do homage 
to those worthies who have deserved and 
achieved a place among the nation's immor- 
tals. I, too, rejoice with you in your inheritance 
in the name and fame of those who have been 
celebrated here by other and abler lecturers than 
I ; and yet, as I remember the manifold distinc- 
tions of him of whom I have been privileged 
to speak, his permanent contributions to the 
theological and ethical thinking of the modern 
world, his ripe sagacity, his rare fortitude, his 
spiritual genius, his high and unblemished 
character, his chivalrous championship of great 
causes, you must not attribute it wholly to the 
fond preference of a prejudiced disciple if I 
hazard the verdict as I close — " this was the 
noblest Roman of them all." 



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